was shocked into immobility, he was too unintelligent to grasp what had occurred…
If the Pentagon didn’t shoot down Flight 77 as it homed in on the Pentagon, the obvious question in the looking-glass world of paranoid conspiracy theory is: did the Pentagon shoot down Flight 93? Flight 93 was the fourth airliner hijacked by terrorists that morning. Unlike the others, it failed to find its target, instead plummeting into a Pennsylvania field. It is commonly considered that Flight 93 came down because its passengers heroically fought back against the hijackers and, in the melee, the plane went out of control or perhaps a terrorist aboard pulled the pin on a bomb.
The conspiracy theory is that Flight 93 was shot down on the orders of the White House before it could reach its target—which almost certainly was that selfsame White House. Here the evidence is unclear. By 8.52 the White House had ordered fighters into the air to seek out any hijacked airliners. Around 10 a.m. CBS TV reported that F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Several witnesses to the Flight 93 crash report seeing a white plane nearby. The wide spread of debris from the plane, it is alleged, points to a midair crash. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld seemed to say that Flight 93 had been shot down, though the White House later maintained he’d made a slip of the tongue.
Some cynics suggest that 9/11 was a poor false-flag operation if the White House had to then stage a cover-up of its shooting down of Flight 93. Whatever, shooting down a hijacked plane to stop its potential use as dive-bomber is not in the same moral league as a false-flag operation.
The weight of evidence is that al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda alone, carried out the 9/11 attacks. Elements of the assault were planned and directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the donkey work was done by a self-supporting al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, led by Mohammed Atta. After receiving training in Afghanistan, the cell moved to the US by summer 2000; in Florida Atta opened an account at the SunTrust bank into which $109,000 was transferred from Dubai, seemingly to finance the upcoming operation. In the following year, al-Qaeda sent a number of Saudi volunteers to join Atta. On the morning of 9/11 a total of 19 terrorists hijacked four aircraft from East Coast airports…
The rest is history, not conspiracy theory.
David Ray Griffin,
Jim Marrs,
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks,
Oklahoma City Bombing
Just after 9 a.m. on 19 April 1995, a massive explosion ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. When the clouds of dust settled, the face of the Murrah building had been shorn off and a crater created that was 30 feet (9m) wide. Sifting through the rubble and wreckage, emergency crews found 169 dead, including 19 children who had been attending a nursery for federal employees on the second floor. Another victim of that day was the American psyche; after Oklahoma it would be more fragmented and suspicious than ever before, with right and left both seeing the bloody hand of the other in the blast’s perpetration. The Oklahoma blast, as federal investigators immediately announced, was no accident, but the result of a bomb.
The debris at the Murrah building offered up the evidence needed to identify one of the bomb-planters. Police found a truck axle which they traced to a Ryder truck rented in Junction City, Kansas. Eyewitnesses at the scene reported seeing a yellow Ryder truck stopped in the disabled parking area at the front of the building, from which two men had descended and hastily hopped into a Mercury car. It was then that the investigators got lucky; at 10.20 a.m., 60 miles (100km) north of Oklahoma, a traffic cop pulled over a 1977 Mercury Marquis for speeding. As officer Charles Hangar approached the car, he noticed it had no licence plates and that the driver appeared to have the telltale bulge of a handgun under his jacket. Hangar took out his own revolver and aimed it at the driver’s head, at which the driver calmly handed over a.45 Glock pistol and a hunting knife.
The driver was one Timothy James McVeigh, a former army sergeant and the future star turn in conspiracy chat rooms. Initially 26–year-old McVeigh was charged with illegally transporting a loaded weapon and driving without licence plates. Two days after his arrest, the charges against him were added to; he was charged with perpetrating the worst terrorist bombing carried out on US soil to that date.
There was much to tie McVeigh to the Oklahoma City crime. He matched eyewitness descriptions of a man with a military haircut exiting the Ryder truck. He allegedly dropped a business card advertising Paulsen’s Military Supply in Hangar’s squad car; on the back of the card McVeigh had written, “More five-pound sticks of TNT by 1 May.” He was found to be carrying a phone debit card issued by the anti-Semitic Liberty Group, and later investigations showed he had used the card to contact the suppliers of the plastic barrels and fertilizer used to make the home-made bomb placed at the Murrah building. Traces of explosive were found on his clothing and his fingerprints were discovered on a receipt for 2,000 lb (900kg) of fertilizer.
McVeigh’s comedy of criminal errors continued. In the lockup in Noble County he listed James Nichols as his next of kin; when Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officials visited the Nichols farm they turned up an array of bomb-making materials, including blasting caps, Primadet detonator cords, and ammonium nitrate. Nichols’s brother Terry gave himself up and was charged with the Oklahoma City bombing alongside McVeigh.
The federal authorities had little trouble in finding the motive for the bombing. In the glove compartment of McVeigh’s rented car the FBI found a letter written by him avowing revenge for the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco; the attack on the Murrah building was staged exactly two years to the day after this raid. McVeigh and Nichols, Michigan militiamen both, considered that the Branch Davidians had been murdered by the federal government. Quite possibly McVeigh was inspired to bomb the Murrah building by reading of a similar
Initially McVeigh proclaimed his innocence, telling
Timothy McVeigh was killed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 11 June 2001. Terry Nichols was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The government then firmly closed the Oklahoma City bombing file. Others, though, have sought to keep it open, since disturbing questions about McVeigh’s conviction have never been satisfactorily answered. Even the presiding judge, Richard P. Matsch, thought so.
In their investigation into the bombing of the Murrah building, the FBI rarely wavered from the track of McVeigh and Nichols. But were others involved? Eyewitnesses at the Murrah building on the morning of the blast spoke of McVeigh being accompanied by a dark-haired, possibly Middle Eastern man; the same man, John Doe 2, had been seen at the Kansas car rental office with him. Later the FBI stated that Nichols was John Doe 2, although Nichols looked nothing like the swarthy identikit picture they’d issued of that suspect. So who was he? According to deputy Kansas sheriff Jake Mauck, John Doe 2 was a local “Patriot”, a claim that has strengthened over the years as reporters uncovered links between McVeigh and the far-right Aryan Republican Army. In 2004 Associated Press reported that the same type of blasting caps used in the Oklahoma City bombing had been used by the Aryan Republican Army in bank robberies across the Midwest.
More evidence that McVeigh and Nichols did not act alone is provided by explosive experts, who state that the duo could not, as the federal government claimed, have assembled a 4,800 lb (2,175kg) fertilizer bomb on the
