bad news. Literally. The Defense Department had lost $2.3 trillion. As it happens, the portion of the building destroyed by “Flight 77” was the precise office that housed the computers recording the DoD’s accounting irregularity.
Something else about the Pentagon attack raises the Truthers’ doubts. There were about eighty-five security cameras trained on the Pentagon, but all the Pentagon would show (after five years of petitioning by Truthers) was five frames of CCTV footage which showed an indefinable blur and an explosion.
To release just five frames prompted an obvious question: what might the other frames reveal? The Pentagon “bomb” conspiracy theory grew wings, especially when it was discovered that 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 for the Truthers 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 was shocked into immobility, he was too unintelligent to grasp what had occurred. Of all the claims of the Truthers, the Pentagon “missile” is the most ludicrous. Hundreds of drivers stuck in the morning rush hour traffic saw a plane hit the side of the military administration building.
What about 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.
In 9/11 conspiracy theory, Flight 93 was shot down on the orders of the White House before it could reach its target—which was the White House. Welcome to the world of Alice in the Looking Glass, because conspiracists complain that it is suspicious that “Flight 77” plane/cruise missile was
Admittedly, on Flight 93 alone of the events of 9/11 the evidence is unclear. By 8.52 the White House had ordered fighters into the air to seek out any hijacked airliners. Around 10.00 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 mid-air 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.
Whatever, shooting down a hijacked plane—if it did happen—to stop its potential use as dive-bomber is not in the same moral league as a false-flag operation. Or a terrorist attack.
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 nineteen terrorists hijacked four aircraft from East Coast airports…
The rest is history, not conspiracy theory.
Oh, and the smallness of the hole in the interior wall of the Pentagon? Sixteen feet is the width of a 757 fuselage. The wings had been ripped off by the outside walls, where the plane had smashed in a 90-feet wide section.
The true problem with the 9/11 “Truth” campaign is that it is barking up the wrong tree. Bush did not deliberately plan 9/11 or allow it to happen, but it is pertinent to ask whether, when he was shown the CIA daily briefing paper headed “bin Laden determined to strike in US”, he failed to push for an adequate investigation because the bin Ladens were family friends and oil industry partners. (The Bushes and the bin Ladens go way back, to the 1970s, when George H. W. Bush’s Arbusto company received a $1 million investment from Salem bin Laden, Osama’s older brother.) The Bush White House consistently refused to release a copy of the briefing, even to the Congressional 9/11 inquiry.
As for the CIA, as far back as 1995, they were informed by the Phillipines police that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was planning to use planes as flying bombs. The French and Russian secret services warned of the attack, and the Egyptians passed on the crucial detail that twenty Al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US for flight training.
Despite this epic dereliction of duty not a single CIA official has been disciplined.
David Ray Griffin,
Jim Marrs,
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks,
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan,
NORTH AMERICAN UNION
The notion that there are powerful forces seeking the integration of Canada, the USA and Mexico into a political union on the model of the European Union is one of the most subtly persuasive of conspiracy theories.
The main elements of the North American Union (NAU) conspiracy feature:
• the construction of a twelve-lane super highway, from Yukon to Yucatan, complete with railtrack and fibre optic cables
• cancellation of the peso, and the Canadian and US dollars in favour of a single currency, the amero
• promotion of Spanish over English
“Follow the money” is as good a rule in conspiriology as it is in journalism or police work. A clique of industrialists—who would benefit from a barrier-free market—are said to be behind the NAU. These industrialists have promoted their continental dream through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Security and Prosperity Partnership, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition, the Independent Task Force on North America (a joint post-9/11 venture by the CFR, the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) which are all designed to bring about the North American Union.
There demonstrably
Doubtless, some of the lobbying and organizing for the NAU is done behind doors. Less obvious, is whether
