The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

States can work in common cause, then surely we who are so fortunate to be in this great chamber—Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives—can come together to fulfil our responsibilities here.

Thank you. Good night. And God bless the United States of America.

9/11

At 8.35 on the humdrum morning of Tuesday 11 September 2001, a hijacked plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Thirty minutes later, a second plane hit the south tower. Over in Washington DC, a third crashed into the Pentagon.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of these attacks. The US had just suffered its worst terrorist incident in history. Kjalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of the military committee of Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda, accepted responsibility: “Yes, we did it,” he told al-Jazeera TV. According to intelligence received, the White House of George W. Bush agreed that al-Qaeda had committed the attack.

Case closed? Not quite.

9/11 was a tragedy for all except paranoid conspiracy theorists, to whom every cloud of explosive smoke has a silver lining. Within weeks of 9/11 the internet was humming with alternative versions of whodunnit and why? By mid-2007 the 9/11 internet conspiracy documentary Loose Change had been downloaded over 4 million times.

For all the multiplicity of post-9/11 conspiracy theories, they boil down to two main hypotheses: that George W. Bush either staged the 9/11 attacks or purposely allowed them to occur because the attacks would generate public support for an invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and other fuel-rich countries. With American oil running out, such invasions were a strategic necessity.

Proponents of the theories—who include Hollywood luminaries Charlie Sheen and David Lynch—point accusingly at the Project for the New American Century, the right-wing think-tank that campaigns for increased American global leadership. Former PNAC members include 9/11-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. An internal PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, allegedly claims that “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to move public opinion in their favour. Proponents of this theory also note the Bush-Bin Laden Connection, the long ties between the two families, together with the administration’s initial opposition to an investigation into the attacks. Could the US government willingly allow an attack on its own people?

Proponents answer “Pearl Harbor”. Even commit a false-flag attack on its own people? Answer: Operation Northwoods. This latter plan, proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, proposed a stage- managed “terrorist” attack on US soil; Castro would get the blame, thus providing the justification for an invasion of Cuba. Northwoods was rejected by the Kennedy administration.

So far as the false-flag case goes, theorists find quite a lot of evidence that the government put its rampant political desires into practice.

First there’s the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the plotters left around. Oddly, amidst 1.6 million tons of debris, investigators found the intact passport of Mohammed Atta, the man alleged to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. So fortuitous was this find, conspiracy researchers suggest, that it must have been a plant. In fact, a number of other laminated passports were found in the debris. Atta also left flight-simulation manuals behind in a car, and apparently a will. However, he cannot have minded their discovery since he was intent on suicide. In fact, he may have wished them to be discovered to let the world know his martyrdom.

Second, what befell the towers of the World Trade Center bears examination. To most observers what happened to the WTC towers on 9/11 is straightforward: two planes hit the towers, then the towers fell down. This “reality” was soon challenged by conspiracy theorists, together with a covey of scientific experts.

Before 9/11 no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire, yet WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 collapsed like pancakes. Particularly unusual was the death of WTC 7, which was not hit by an aircraft. Additionally, according to at least one demolition expert, the billows of dust coming out of the towers were more indicative of explosion than fire. Steel wreckage recovered from the site shows that it became molten; fire is not usually able to effect this change in steel. But a bomb is.

The “controlled demolition hypothesis” is a central plank of 9/11 conspiracy theory, featuring heavily in David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2005), and most cogently argued by Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University. Jones asserts that without demolition charges a “gravity-driven collapse” of the sort that happened to the WTC buildings would defy the laws of physics.

By the laws of “controlled demolition hypothesis” the WTC was rigged with explosive devices, probably containing thermite. The strange comment by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, on a PBS documentary that he told the fire department to “pull it” makes sense in this scenario: “pull it” is demolition industry slang for setting off demolition charges. (Silverstein’s spokesman said later that Silverstein meant “pull it” as in “pull outta there”.) The bottom-to-top-style collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 is said to be typical of controlled demolitions. Fuelling conspiracy theory is the fact that building 7 housed offices of the CIA and the FBI, plus New York City’s emergency command bunker.

In counterpoint to the controlled-demolition hypothesis is the finding of the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report into 9/11. According to this report the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the impact of the planes, thus opening them to fire damage. Fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, which made the floors sag. Sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns, making them bow inwards. Buckled columns could not support the building. Thus the buildings collapsed. NIST’s finding are supported by a whole range of independent researchers.

What the controlled-demolition hypothesis fails to take into account is the aviation fuel carried by the planes. Skyscrapers were never made to withstand the effects of having thousands of gallons of ignited aviation fuel swilling around inside them.

Demolition experts have also weighed in on NIST’s side. To place enough lethal charges around three skyscrapers would require weeks of work and tons of explosive. Security at the WTC was among the tightest in the US, following a terrorist attack there in 1993. Wouldn’t somebody have noticed men carrying in bags of explosives for days on end or heard the drilling work needed to secure the devices to the steel frames?

Over to Washington DC. Like the WTC, the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane… or was it? Whereas in NY the dramatic extent of the damage done by the hijacked planes arouses suspicion, in Washington it is the limited extent of the damage done that incurs disbelief. In 2002 French writer Thierry Meyssan published 9/11: The Big Lie, which noted that the hole in the outer wall of the west wing was too small to have been caused by an incoming Boeing 747 and that the interior of the Pentagon was suspiciously undamaged. According to Meyssan, the hole was caused by a cruise missile. (A more realistic weapon, some commentators feel, than the HAARP-like energy beam nominated by Assistant Professor Judy Woods as the doomslayer-of-the-day on 9/11.) To counter the growing controversy, the Pentagon released five frames of CCTV footage from the stock that it had, on security grounds, confiscated after 9/11.

But to release just five frames prompted an obvious question: what was being hidden that the remainder of the frames might reveal? The 9/11 conspiracy theory gained a new lease of life. The plane—most now agreed there was a plane—that crashed into the Pentagon had been able to fly towards Washington for 40 minutes, despite radar, despite missile batteries, despite the proximity of Andrews Air Force Base. The section of the Pentagon which the plane crashed into was nearly empty at the time. All this is taken by the 9/11 Truth Campaign as definite evidence that 9/11 was stage-managed or known about.

The clincher is the footage of George W. Bush’s infamous response when his reading of a story to a Florida kindergarten was interrupted by an aide to tell him of the attacks. Bush continued reading. He could only have carried on being so calm, the theory goes, if he knew about the attacks in advance.

The fact is that the Pentagon was designed to withstand an air attack. The limestone layers shattered with the impact of the Boeing but the reinforced steel internal cage remained intact, hence the apparent lack of internal damage. Bush’s response can be explained in a multitude of ways: he wanted to give the appearance of calm, he