Adelaide Now : The big lie

The big lie

by ADAM HARVEY in NEW YORK | via Sunday Mail (SA) | September 10, 2006

FIVE years after September 11, more than one-third of Americans believe the US Government was complicit in the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

This extraordinary reaction to one of the most widely witnessed, reported and investigated incidents of modern times has been fuelled by what adherents like to call the "9/11 Truth Movement".

Type "9/11 conspiracy" into Google and you'll be hit with 18 million different links to sites such as 911truth.org and letsroll911.org that claim the "official" version of what happened that day is a sham.

"We don't believe that 19 hijackers and a few others in a cave in Afghanistan pulled this off acting alone," says Steven Jones, a physics professor from Utah's Brigham Young University.

He - and many others - believe the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives planted by government agents and the plane strikes were merely a distraction.

Theorists like Prof Jones claim to have uncovered hard evidence that "proves":

NEW YORK'S Twin Towers were hit by military jets and brought down by controlled demolition.

A MYSTERIOUS white jet shot down United Flight 93.

THE Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile.

Most of the conspiracy theorists say that whoever was "really" behind 9/11 was motivated by a desire to invade Iraq, take control of oil fields, profit from defence contracts, and strengthen Israel.

And they almost always point the finger at "high-placed" behind-the scenes manipulators and opportunists led by vice-president Dick Cheney.

Long ignored by the mainstream media, the theorists are now having their moment in the spotlight with two recent opinion polls saying millions of Americans do not believe al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks of September 11.

A Ohio University poll, for example, says 36 per cent of Americans believe the Bush administration was either an active participant or had prior warning of the 9/11 attacks.

The view is reflected in newspaper and TV polls, which have been seized upon by radicals such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hinting that the US officials were involved in 9/11.

On the surface, some theories seem rational: Prof Jones says he's found evidence of explosive residue in the dust of the World Trade Centre.

Other theories are based on claims that are easy to make but difficult to disprove such as:

JEWS were warned to stay away from the World Trade Centre that day.

FEDERAL Emergency Management Agency workers were sent to New York City the night before the attacks.

Others ignore the vast array of evidence that points to a terrorist attack and focus on a handful of facts that don't seem to add up, such as:

WHY was the hole in the Pentagon so much smaller than a passenger jet?

HOW could the barely qualified pilots who hijacked the planes execute such a complex series of manouevres to crash into their targets?

WHY was so little aircraft wreckage found?

Some theories border on the insane, with one popular theory claiming all four hijacked flights were forced to land, the passengers were disposed of, their planes replaced with military jets which then fired missiles at New York and Washington before they were crashed into their targets.

Theorists who raise these questions try to appear legitimate with a selective use of science, such as the temperatures at which steel melts and reproducing seismic charts to show evidence of a bomb detonation in Manhattan that morning.

The theorists use flawed logic, says Jonathan Barnett, an expert in fireproofing who helped the official investigation into the towers' collapse.

"The fact that you don't have evidence to support your theory doesn't mean that the other theory is true," says Mr Barnett, from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

"Basically, they just made it up out of the blue."

A book called 9/11: The Big Lie that claims the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, not a plane, has sold 200,000 copies and been translated in 20 languages.

Documentaries like In Plane Site and Loose Change have become box office winners with their claims that virtually nothing about September 11 is what it seems.

Loose Change began its life as a film about a fictional government conspiracy, but director Dylan Avery says his research led him to realise there really was a conspiracy and he decided to scrap the film and make a documentary instead.

He casts doubts on one of the most famous incidents of September 11 - the fightback of passengers aboard United 93.

NO one really knows what happened on that flight because mobile phones don't work at high altitudes, claims Avery.

He suspects someone using a voice synthesiser faked phone calls from passengers like Mark Bingham, who told his mother shortly before the plane went down: "Some of us here are going to try to do something."

Without substantiating his claims, Avery has always maintained: "The cell phone calls were fake -- no ifs, ands or buts.

"Until the government can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that al-Qaida was behind September 11, the American people have every reason to believe otherwise," he said.

Those behind the theories aren't just self-interested filmmakers and raving bloggers: there are physics professors, pilots, engineers, scientists, supposed eyewitnesses, a handful of celebrities and even former military officers. A former Department of Defence official and opponent of the war in Iraq, Dr Robert Bowman, says "the official version of 9/11, the official conspiracy, is a lot of hogwash".

His proof? Withheld surveillance tapes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon, the confiscation of air traffic control voice tapes, and the FBI's failure to connect Zaccarias Moussaoui with an impending plot to hit the World Trade Centre.

"Taken together, this is proof that high levels of our government don't want us to know what happened and who was responsible," Dr Bowman says.

And, if his "proof" isn't convincing enough, the so-called Truth Movement has even enlisted a celebrity, actor Charlie Sheen, who recently said: "It seems to me like 19 amateurs with boxcutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 per cent of their targets raises a lot of questions."

Perhaps the most relevant question is why so many people like Sheen have clutched on to the paper-thin claims of films like Loose Change, while dismissing the mountain of evidence cited in the 9/11 Commission report and other official investigations.
Slow to react, government officials and politicians are finally waking up to the danger of uncontested conspiracy theories.

The State Department has released fact sheets about 9/11 addressing some of the most prevalent theories, such as the one that claims 4000 Jews heeded a warning not to work at the World Trade Centre on that fatal morning.

About 400 people - about 15 per cent - of those who died in New York on September 11 were Jews, said the Department of State.

That death rate approximately mirrors the proportion of Jews living in the city -- meaning that either no warning was issued, or it was ignored. US Senator John McCain says the theorists are severely misguided.

"They ignore the methods of science, the protocols of investigation and the dictates of logic," he said.

"The 9/11 conspiracy movement exploits the public's anger and sadness; shakes Americans' faith in their government at a time when that faith is already near an all-time low."

Some media organisations such as Popular Science magazine are finally taking the theorists to task.

An exhaustive investigation by Popular Science stripped back each conspiracy to its core set of facts, and then used science and logic to reveal the truth behind the myth. A new book, Debunking 9/11 Myths, details the magazine's findings.

Popular Science found each conspiracy theory was supported by little more than shoddy research, misinterpretations of evidence, and leaps of logic that would embarrass a primary school student.

The myths soon collapse under the weight of their own hot air.

THE MYTH

HIJACKERS were not skilled enough to fly four airliners through the complicated series of manoeuvres needed to hit their targets.

THE TRUTH

ALL four pilots had logged at least 250 hours flying time and were commercially licenced pilots.

They had trained extensively on commercial jet flight simulators, and didn't have to perform the most complicated parts of any flight: taking off, flying in bad weather, and landing.

The Twin Towers pilots could see their targets from 100km away, and the Pentagon hijackers used autopilot to fly almost all the way to their destination and then disengaged it when they were just a few minutes from their target.

THE MYTH

THE towers were struck by military cargo planes or fuel tankers. Windows are not visible in any photographs or footage of the planes before they struck the towers. A witness, cameraman Marc Birnbach, is famously quoted as saying of seeing one plane hit: ``It definitely didn't look like a commercial plane. I didn't see any windows on the sides.''

THE TRUTH

BIRNBACH told Popular Science he was 3km away and didn't see the plane hit. The plane was tilted away from him, meaning the windows on the right side were pointed towards the sky. Part of a United Airlines fuselage, complete with portholes, was found on the roof of the World Trade Centre.

THE MYTH

THE towers were professionally demolished. An aircraft impact is not sufficient to knock down a skyscraper, and dust ``squibs'' indicating a controlled demolition are visible just before the towers collapsed.

THE TRUTH

THE aircraft severed a large portion of the external steel web that gave the towers much of their strength.

Other metal supporting columns were weakened by the ferocious heat generated by burning jet fuel.

The "squibs" were actually pressurised air being squeezed out of the building as the floors above it compacted.

Experts say a successful demolition would require hundreds of tonnes of explosives packed around each weight-bearing column in the building.

Installing the charges would have taken 75 men at least three months.

THE MYTH

THE Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile. Security tape of the attack shows a white blur, not a plane. The entry hole in the building was only 5m wide and no plane wreckage was found.

THE TRUTH

THE plane flew over morning commuters, and hundreds of witnesses saw it hit the Pentagon.

Security cameras film at a very slow frame rate -- far too slow to show an object moving at 780 feet per second.

Photographs taken after the attack and before the facade collapsed show a hole 30m wide, not 5m.

A Boeing 757 is 40m from wingtip to wingtip, but parts of both wings were sheared off when they struck a generator and external vent near the Pentagon. Most of the plane was shredded on impact, but the landing gear punched through three of the building's rings, and was recognisable in photographs.

THE MYTH

UNITED Flight 93 was shot down by a jet that had been repainted white to disguise military markings. Debris from the plane was found kilometres from the impact zone, proving that it had exploded in midair.

THE TRUTH

THE white plane seen by witnesses is no secret - it was a corporate jet rerouted by flight controllers to the last known radar location of United 93. It circled the smoking impact zone as the pilot radioed in what he had found.

The furthest piece of debris from the impact zone was just a few hundred metres away.