Dig Within

Since September 11, 2001, the United States has initiated a number of wars in Muslim countries. These wars, which would be more correctly called massacres, have resulted in the deaths of countless innocent Muslims.  In some cases, attempts have been made to present these aggressions in the guise of humanitarian efforts to promote democracy.  But the limited public support for U.S. military action around the world goes back to the U.S. government claim that Muslims were responsible for 9/11. This claim is untrue and it is past time for people to recognize that fact.

There are many ways to see that Muslims were not responsible for 9/11.  Author David Ray Griffin has previously made arguments in this regard.[1]  As time goes on, however, more facts lead people to realize that claims of Muslim responsibility for terrorism in the U.S. should be highly suspect. These facts include that the October 2001 anthrax attacks were blamed on Muslims only to be later traced to a U.S. military facility and to non-Muslim, U.S. scientists.  Moreover, a number of FBI-planned acts of terrorism since 2001 have been falsely attributed to young Muslims who were victims of appalling acts of entrapment by the FBI.[2]

According to the official account of 9/11, nineteen young Arab Muslims were responsible for the entirety of the mass murder that day. The FBI accused these young men within 72 hours of the attacks and, although the list changed slightly at first, it has remained the same since shortly after the attacks.  To support the accusations, U.S. authorities pointed to passports that were found under implausible circumstances, luggage containing unbelievably convenient documents, and other dubious evidence.

In October 2001, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote —

“Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists’ identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, ‘Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase.’”[3]

Years later, the 9/11 Commission Report (911CR) was written by a professional myth-maker, Phillip Zelikow, who was also a Bush Administration insider.  Oddly enough, the outline for the report was written by Zelikow and his colleague Ernest May even before the investigation began.  It is now widely accepted that the 9/11 Commission and the FBI did very poorly in terms of investigating most aspects of the attacks. In just one example, the FBI never even interviewed the people suspected of engaging in 9/11 insider trading.[4]

Despite the poor quality of the investigation, the 911CR used inflammatory language which focused on Muslims as “the enemy.”  The Commission told us that “the enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless.”  The Commission was being false and misleading when it made these statements, however, as the evidence shows that 9/11 was not a Muslim crime.

Muslims do not Murder Innocent People

The most obvious reason that the Commission was off-track is that Muslims do not murder innocent people.  Some people find this statement outrageous.  Of course Muslims murder innocent people, they say, that’s what al Qaeda does.

The problem is that, as a society, many of us have been trained to accept religion as a noncommittal affiliation or label.  For example, many of the current U.S. leaders have engaged in mass murder around the world over the last ten years yet they still call themselves Christians.  Anyone can see that they are not. Those who truly believe in God live by the laws of the religion they proclaim and Christians do not engage in wars of aggression or the torture and killing of other human beings.

The word “Muslim” is Arabic and literally means “one who submits (to God).”  But Webster’s Dictionary defines a “Muslim” as an adherent to Islam.  Being an adherent of Islam means to follow the teachings of the Holy Qu’ran.  And according to the Qur’an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed no fault:

• “If someone kills another person – unless it is in retaliation for someone else or for causing corruption in the earth – it is as if he had murdered all mankind.”  (Surat al-Ma’ida: 32)

Defenders of the official myth might say that the 9/11 attacks can be seen as retaliation for the corruption in U.S. financial (WTC) and military (Pentagon) activities.  Problems with that argument include the fact that it doesn’t absolve the 9/11 terrorists from having killed many innocent people, including children and dozens of Muslims.[4]  It also doesn’t explain how many of the financial leaders in the WTC, and all of the top military leaders at the Pentagon, escaped with their lives.

Furthermore, polls in countries with large Muslim populations indicate that Muslims oppose the killing of civilians in warfare significantly more than non-Muslims do.  People in Muslim countries “roundly reject attacks on civilians. Asked about politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, majorities in all countries—usually overwhelming majorities—take the strongest position offered by saying such violence cannot be justified at all.”[6]

To avoid this direct problem, some say that the alleged 9/11 hijackers were nominally Muslims. In other words, they were people who called themselves Muslims but who just didn’t follow this one requirement of the Qu’ran.  This article doesn’t delve into the carefully cultivated phenomenon called “radical Islam,” but the evidence we have indicates that the men accused of hijacking planes on 9/11 were either not involved at all, or were not even close to being adherents of Islam.

The Men Accused of Hijacking the Planes Were Either Not Involved or Were Not Muslims

In the weeks after 9/11, many mainstream news sources reported that the accused hijackers were still alive.  These claims were reported by major media sources like The Independent, the London Telegraph and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Although BBC attempted to retract the claims later, the Telegraph reported that it had interviewed some of these men, who the newspaper said had the same names, same dates of birth, same places of birth, and same occupations as the accused.[7]

No other media sources have successfully explained the discrepancies around the reports of the alleged hijackers still being alive.  One particularly weak attempt, cited as the primary source at Wikipedia, was an absurd hand-waving piece in Der Spiegel that used “U.S. Historian Daniel Pipes” as the authority.[8]  Not mentioned is the fact that Pipes, a second-generation neocon and Project for the New American Century signatory, is arguably the world’s leading Islamophobe.[9]

Most importantly, the “hijackers alive” reports were not investigated by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission. In fact, the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, publicly expressed doubts about the identity of the hijackers.  Yet to this day there has been no official response to these contradictions despite their high relevance to the overall investigation.

We can imagine that these cases were probably the result of stolen identities and some follow-up media statements suggested just that. With the likelihood of stolen identities, and without an official investigation to clarify, we are left with the conclusion that some of the accused men were not involved.  It could be that there may have been other people involved who have never been identified, but without facts to go on we cannot say.

The men who appear to have been falsely accused include the brothers Wail and Waleed al Shehri, and Abdulaziz al Omari.[10]  The language in the 911CR suggests that al Omari was the most devout of the accused men, in that he “often served as an imam at his mosque in Saudi Arabia.”  But since his identity was stolen and he was therefore not involved, we must look to the other accused men for Muslim connections.

Others who appear to be victims of identity theft include Mohand al Shehri, Salem al Hazmi, Saeed al Ghamdi, and Ahmed al Nami.  Although the Commission’s report states that al Ghamdi “attended prayer services regularly,” he was also reported to have trained at the Lackland Air Force Base’s Defense Language Institute, which is a fact that does not support his being a religious fanatic with limitless hostility toward the United States. The report also says of al Hazmi that he was “unconcerned with religion.”   In any case, these four must be excluded from the oxymoronic label of “Muslim terrorist” because it appears they were falsely accused.

Another of the accused men who the Commission says was “unconcerned with religion” was Satam al Suqami.  This description appears to be correct because, according to The Boston Globe, al Saqami liked to sleep with prostitutes, which is a decidedly non-Muslim activity.[11]  In Islam, prostitution and other forms of sexual deviancy are forbidden.  Therefore, although al Suqami was not reported to be still alive, he was not a Muslim.

In the months and days leading up to 9/11, the alleged hijackers were reported to have drank alcohol heavily in bars, purchased pornographic materials, watched strippers, and paid for lap dances.  Needless to say, people who follow the teachings of the Qu’ran (Muslims) do not do any of those things.

As Temple University professor of Islamic Studies, Mahmoud Mustafa Ayoub, said in relation to the alleged 9/11 hijackers—“Islam does not condone killing innocent people in the name of God. Nor can a devout Muslim drink booze or party at a strip club and expect to reach heaven.”[12]

Two of the men were being watched by the CIA for at least twenty months prior to 9/11.  These were Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and they did not follow the Qu’ran either.  As reported by the Los Angeles Times, these two were often seen at Cheetah’s, a nude bar in San Diego.

The most glaring examples of non-Muslim behavior, however, were exhibited by the alleged hijacker pilots of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.  According to the 911CR, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi piloted these airliners and crashed them into the WTC towers. Public knowledge about them indicates that they might have been trained at U.S. military facilities, but it is clear that they did not even try to follow the Qu’ran.  Frankly, Phillip Zelikow is more of a Muslim than they were.

For one thing, Atta and al Shehhi were known to dress in gaudy jewelry and clothes. Because of this, people thought they were mafia characters. As author Daniel Hopsicker wrote, they wore “Gold jewelry, expensive watches, and silk shirts” and were “Not exactly a description of Islamic fundamentalists.”[13]  Additionally, their activities in Florida, in the years prior to 9/11, were closely aligned with those of gunrunners and drug smugglers, which also indicates that they were anything but Muslims.

Atta’s stripper girlfriend, Amanda Keller, said that Atta and al Shehhi “had massive supplies of cocaine” which they restocked whenever needed at one of the flight schools run by Dutch nationals in Florida.  Keller said that during the time she dated him, she saw Atta do cocaine himself on multiple occasions.[14]  And, of course, Muslims don’t do cocaine or other illicit drugs.

Witnesses saw Al Shehhi and Atta drunk at a Hollywood, Florida sports bar.  On another occasion in Palm Beach, Atta and Alshehhi were seen spending $1,000 on champagne in only 45 minutes.  During the latter escapade, Atta was with a tall busty brunette and Alshehhi was with a short blonde woman. Both women were known locally as high-priced escorts.[15]

A stripper in Las Vegas, Nevada recalled that Marwan al Shehhi was “cheap,” because he paid only $20 for a lap dance. In the summer of 2001, Al Shehhi was apparently also seen in a nude bar in Pompado Beach, Florida.  Six exotic dancers who worked there testified to seeing him. At the same time, both al Shehhi and Hamza Alghamdi were witnessed purchasing pornographic video and sex toys from a Florida store.  The Wall Street Journal reported that Alghamdi watched a porn video in his hotel room, and others witnessed alleged hijacker Majed Moqed visiting a porn shop on several occasions in the months before 9/11.[16]

This same categorically non-Muslim behavior was also true for Ziad Jarrah, the alleged hijacker pilot of Flight 93, which was destroyed in a field in Pennsylvania.  Seven months before the attacks, it was noticed that Jarrah “frequented” a strip club in Jacksonville, Florida.[17]

The 911CR says that six of the alleged hijackers lived in Paterson, NJ for up to six months.  This included Hani Hanjour, Nawaf al Hazmi, Khalid al Mihdhar, the man mis-identified as Abdulaziz al Omari, and others.  Reports put Ziad Jarrah in Paterson as well.  The mayor of Paterson, Marty Barnes, certainly noticed them and he made the point of how non-Muslim they were, saying—“Nobody ever saw them at mosques, but they liked the go-go clubs.”[18]

Given that Atta and friends were so far from being Muslims, it actually makes sense that the U.S. government would try, in the days after 9/11, to bolster the political story by adding actual Muslims to its quickly drawn-up list.  The real al Omari, for example, was obviously not involved.  But the discrepancy between his being an imam and a go-go club aficionado who never went to the mosques would quickly be lost in the post-9/11 clamor for revenge.  And the public’s most banal and prejudiced tendencies could be better exploited with hints of Muslim connections, no matter how weak, just as they have been with the anthrax attacks and the ongoing FBI-planned terrorism.

In any case because the alleged hijacker pilots were clearly not Muslims, the deaths caused by the destruction of those planes cannot be attributed to Muslims. This includes the deaths of the airplane passengers and the people in the impact zones of the WTC.

The Alleged Hijackers Were Not Responsible Most of the Deaths, If Any

The 911CR says that Hani Hanjour, the accused hijacker pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, was the terrorist operation’s most experienced pilot. The official account tells us that he slammed the aircraft into the Pentagon at the first-floor level going over 500 mph.  But all the evidence indicates that he was a very poor pilot at best. He repeatedly failed his training courses on single engine aircraft and according to representatives of his flight training schools he had no fundamental pilot skills.[19]  Due to these facts, we know that Hanjour could not have flown the plane as alleged.  So it doesn’t matter if he was a Muslim.

It is possible that all the planes were commandeered by way of existing remote control technology, which would explain a number of the unanswered questions.[20]  Remote piloting could explain why the planes did not squawk the hijack code, why the auto-pilot stayed on during the hijacking process, and how these planes were flown with extreme precision at very high speeds regardless of the poor skills of the alleged pilots.  It would also explain how those who planned the attacks could have remained confident of their success, despite having employed unreliable, cocaine-snorting, alcoholic perverts as “hijackers.”

Regardless of who actually flew the planes, we know that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of actions which could not have been accomplished by the accused men.  Of course, the initial hijackings could be blamed on the alleged, non-Muslim hijackers and one might argue that some passengers and crew members were said to be killed during the hijackings.  But so little is known about how the hijackings occurred that it is difficult to know what really happened.  The 9/11 Commission could not even say how the alleged hijackers entered the cockpits of any of the four planes, or why the hijack code was not squawked for any of them.

If we examine what was needed to facilitate the attacks, we see that most of the deaths on 9/11 were the result of many things that should not have happened.  And none of it could have been accomplished without the involvement of U.S. authorities.

1. Pre-9/11 investigations that would have caught the accused men were shut down.
2. All the levels of hijacking prevention failed four separate times.
3. For several hours, our leaders did nothing to protect the nation.
4. The planes should have been intercepted but they were not.[21]
5. The planes were flown like guided missiles.
6. Three WTC skyscrapers were completely destroyed, and all of them fell through what should have been the path of most resistance.[22]
7. Evidence for explosives at the Pentagon was discovered and not explained.
8. The debris damage in Pennsylvania indicates that Flight 93 was shot down.

An extensive examination of the people who had access to the WTC towers shows that the accused men were not among those who could have placed explosives in those highly-secure buildings, nor were any Muslims known to be in such a position.[23]  Therefore, there is no evidence whatsoever that the accused non-Muslims, or any unspecified Muslims, caused the deaths of the nearly 2,600 people who were killed in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

It is reasonable to say, without an extensive inquiry, that Muslims could not have shut down the pre-9/11 investigations. Similarly, they could not have caused the repeated failure of a hijacking prevention system that had been successful for over 20 years.  Muslims certainly could not have stopped U.S. leaders from doing their jobs on 9/11, nor could they have disabled the U.S. air defenses or shot down Flight 93.

Additionally, there is no doubt that Muslims were not to blame for delaying and obstructing the investigation into 9/11, during which time the U.S. and its allies had already initiated massacres in the Middle East. The official accounts that were finally generated, that ignored most of the important evidence and are transparently false, are not the work of Muslims either.  The murder of millions of people has been falsely justified by way of those official accounts.

Muslims could not have done any of these things. Not even the drug-abusing drunk called Mohammed Atta, who dated strippers, dressed like a gangster and hung out with drug runners, could have done those things.

Moving Beyond Islamophobia 

We do have clues about who might have been involved though. For example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush showed up at Rudi Dekkers’ flight school in Venice, Florida where Atta and several of the other accused men had trained, within 24-hours after the attacks, to confiscate all the school’s records.[24]  Curiously, Jeb and his brother, the President of the United States, had three relatives working for companies within the impact zones of the WTC towers (Craig Stapleton, Jim Pierce, and Prescott Bush Jr).[25]

Dekkers was a pervert just like the accused, non-Muslim men and he was brought up on charges for sexual harassment. Another of the many weird facts about Dekkers was that he claimed to be a New York City cop, and had a plaque on his wall with words to that effect.[26]  This might remind us of Bernard Kerik, the “9/11 hero” who led the New York City Police department when it was credited with providing some of the dubious evidence against the accused. Kerik not only dressed like a gangster, he was known to have associated with mafia characters.  Coincidentally, the same things were said about FBI agent and lead al Qaeda investigator, John O’Neill.

Kerik spent years working in Saudi Arabia, first for the Saudi royal family and then for one of the companies that later was located near the impact zone in the south tower.  Interestingly, Kerik was the first person to tell us that explosives were not involved in the destruction of the WTC.  Unfortunately, we can’t get follow-up comments from him because he’s now in prison.

There remain many avenues for further investigation into the accused hijackers and who they really were.  Could there be a connection between the porn shops and strip clubs that the accused men liked to visit, and covert activities or organized crime?  Could those connections lead from places like Las Vegas and Florida to New York City, and shed light on why so many mafia-linked companies were hired to clean-up the WTC site?

Could the links between Atta, Dekkers’ financier Wally Hilliard, and international drug-running have anything to do with creating a pretext for war in Afghanistan, the country that now leads the world in opium production?  That certainly would make sense given that the southwest Florida area near Venice, where Dekkers, Atta and the alleged hijackers spent so much time, was home to a long history of CIA and drug trafficking operations.

Two long-time law enforcement officers interviewed by Daniel Hopsicker said they had “witnessed a 40-year long history of CIA-connected covert operations in their area.”  They were describing Atta’s home port in early 2001, the Charlotte County Airport.  They added that “they believed that the CIA was somehow involved, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.”[27]

Forty years is not quite right, however, as the history of covert drug operations in that area went back at least 60 years.  The tiny Venice Airport, where most of the alleged hijackers trained, originated as the Venice Army Airfield and was the home of the operatives who worked for General Claire Chennault.[28] Civil Air Transport, the successor to Chennault’s Flying Tigers and the world’s largest heroin-trafficking operation at the time, transported the drugs that funded the early covert operations of the CIA, and those airmen worked closely with organized crime while doing so.[29]

For the 12 years prior to 9/11, drug trafficking and terrorist training in the Venice, Florida area was overlooked by the region’s congressional representative, former CIA operative Porter Goss, and its Senator, Bob Graham.  It might not be surprising then, to notice that Goss and Graham led the first official inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t find much.

Unfortunately, these leads are not being investigated due to continued support for the false claim that the alleged hijackers were adherents of Islam.  Such support for the official conspiracy theory also promotes the ongoing Muslim genocide.  We don’t know where all this falsehood will lead in the future, but people who seek the truth about 9/11 should move beyond blaming Muslims and get back to useful investigative work.

Three years ago, an international team of scientists published a scientific paper that established the presence of thermitic residues in the dust from the World Trade Center (WTC) catastrophe.[1]  Although the paper was only the last in a mutually-supportive evidentiary chain, it gave more hard evidence that energetic materials were used to destroy the WTC buildings.  This conclusion was in agreement with the other scientific articles that had been previously published, and was also in agreement with eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence.

The paper was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in February 2009. Since that time, it has been personally delivered to many members of the U.S. Congress and to scientists at universities around the world.  In response, the silence has been deafening. The simple fact that professional scientists could publish such evidence, and over a period of three years be met with no answer from government and academic leaders, is an astounding fact that speaks volumes about the mindlessness that pervades society today.

The few unofficial responses that have been made are interesting, however.

About a year after publication, one of the primary creators of the ever-changing, but always transparently false official WTC explanations began to make deceptive attempts to manipulate the authors of the paper.[2]  This was Gene Corley, who apparently gave up after repeated failures to surreptitiously obtain pre-processed samples.

We can only imagine why Corley, who was the first leader of the WTC investigation and had far more access to WTC dust at a far earlier date than any independent researchers, would make such attempts to deceive. But other similar attempts have recently been made by Chris Mohr, a strong supporter of the official conspiracy theory.  Mohr has tried to secure samples that he could say were obtained from me personally, and in doing so has also engaged in deception and has made false statements about our communications.

Mr. Mohr calls himself a proponent of a “natural collapse” explanation for the WTC, and he has promoted that vague hypothesis in debates against those questioning the official accounts.  On the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, Mohr joined the ranks of the dubious “Skeptic Society,” the leader of which I debated in 2007.[3]  Mohr’s article in the September 2011 issue of Skeptic Magazine demonstrated just how far some people are willing to go in order to avoid the problems with the official account of 9/11.[4]   While providing utterly unconvincing and vacuous answers to a dozen straw man questions, Mohr’s article ignores essentially all the evidence presented in ten years by real 9/11 skeptics.

Having failed to make any new converts to the myth behind the “War on Terror,” Mohr has resorted to attempts to refute the science in the 2009 “Active Thermitic Materials” paper.  The problem is, despite being the new scientific spokesman for the “Skeptic Society,” Mohr has no science background at all and struggles with the basic concepts behind the paper.  Because of this, he set out to find an “independent” expert to champion his cause.

Mohr stated in one of his many unsolicited emails that — “It took me months, and contacting over two dozen labs, to find Millette and his lab, who has both the means and the openmindedness to do this right.”[5]  This message refers to Jim Millette, a long-time government scientist who worked for the EPA and now runs his own business called MVA Scientific Consultants.  Unfortunately, although Mohr took months to find this new champion, it took him only seconds to decide that he would say nothing about Millette’s leadership of the government studies on WTC dust.  When Mohr wrote to me in a mass email asking for pre-processed samples to use in his new project, he failed to mention anything about Millette’s past work on WTC dust.

Millette and his colleagues published several government-funded reports on the WTC dust, which represent the official analyses.  For some reason, these don’t mention the strong evidence of molten metal that was found by the USGS, the RJ Lee Corporation, and the international team which published the 2009 paper.  It appears that Millette and company did find such evidence, in the form of the iron spheres which are abundant in the WTC dust, but a decision was made to de-emphasize that evidence.[6]  Of course, Mohr doesn’t tell people that.  He knows that Millette and his colleagues did not report iron spheres in the official WTC dust signature study, despite iron spheres being a prominent and unusual component in the dust.

That is a striking fact in itself, but there have also been accusations of fraud against Millette and his colleagues.  EPA whistleblower Dr. Cate Jenkins used the phrase “deliberate misrepresentation” with regard to their studies in which samples were manipulated through pre-conditioning to lower the pH before testing.  Millette’s name shows up in Jenkins’ report four times because he participated in several EPA-funded studies that Jenkins has charged with fraud.  Millette did a lot of the analytical work on the WTC dust for these government teams, and was the leader in the laboratory for the government-sponsored studies.[7]

Of course, Mohr won’t tell you about the accusations of fraud either.

In any case it is very interesting that it took Mohr several months of contacting dozens of labs to find the one person who did all the government laboratory work on the WTC dust.  We might wonder about the other dozens of labs.  Wouldn’t they take Mohr’s money?  In the end, why did Mohr insist on using this one lab that had been implicated in charges of fraud related to WTC dust analysis?  What made those dozens of other labs unsuitable, or less “open minded,” than the guy who didn’t see the evidence before?

We might never know.  But it appears that Millette will begin to report his new findings for the “skeptic” Mohr next week, at a conference in Atlanta.  It will be interesting to see if Millette will now report the abundant iron spheres, which all other scientists have seen in almost every sample.  The fact that he has worked for years on federal contracts for NIST and the Bush Department of Justice, since 9/11, makes that seem unlikely.  As for the possibility of Millette confirming the presence of thermitic materials in the WTC dust, which would indict his own previous work, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.

In the meantime, we can rest assured that the U.S. government and government-sponsored universities will not respond to the finding of energetic materials at the WTC, or to any of the peer-reviewed scientific articles on the subject.  Three years without a response is response enough.

Due to the incredible number of coincidences proposed by the official reports on the events of September 11, 2001, it makes good sense for citizens to question any improbable claims related to that day.  We have been given at least two such odd stories about flights that left Andrews Air Force Base that morning.  One represents a highly improbable flight path and the other has produced a contradiction in official accounts.

The first of these flights concerns a large military cargo plane, a C-130H, called Gofer 06.  This plane was from the 133rd airlift wing of the Minnesota Air National Guard.  The 9/11 Commission Report claims that the Gofer 06 pilot and crew were first-hand witnesses to the demise of both Flight 77 and Flight 93.

It was said that the C-130H pilot, Lt. Col Steve O’Brien, was returning from delivering supplies to the Carribean, which more specifically meant the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Air Force Magazine recently reported that seven other crew members were on board, including copilot Maj. Robert Schumacher and flight engineer MSgt Jeff Rosenthal.[1]

The official timeline of this improbable flight begins as follows:  Just after 09:30, Gofer 06 took off from Andrews AFB and Flight 77 flew “right in front of [it], a mile and a half, two miles away.”[2]  Air traffic controllers (ATCs) from Reagan National Airport (in Arlington, VA) asked the C-130H pilot to identify and follow the “suspicious aircraft.”[3] According to the Commission report, Gofer 06 identified the aircraft as a Boeing 757 and, seconds after impact, Lt. Col. O’Brien said—”it looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir.”  In the recent Air Force Magazine article, Rosenthal claims that—”We saw it crash into the Pentagon.”

Therefore, thirty minutes after millions of Americans had witnessed a second aircraft crash in the World Trade Center (WTC), routine flights were taking off from Andrews AFB, the military base with several interceptor jets at the ready only 10 miles from the Pentagon. The interceptor jets would not take off from Andrews until approximately 90 minutes later. This was all happening just minutes after a series of exchanges between Vice President Cheney and a “young man,” which Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta witnessed and testified were focused on “the plane that came into the Pentagon.”[4]

Numerous questions come to mind when reading just this small part of the official narrative.

• Why would Andrews AFB launch a cargo plane instead of interceptor jets at a time when three airliners had been hijacked and two of them had crashed into the WTC 30 minutes earlier?
• How could civilian ATCs expect an unwieldy cargo plane, which had a cruise speed of 336 mph (and a maximum speed of 366 mph), to keep up with a Boeing airliner which the official report says was traveling at 530 mph?
• Even if Gofer 06 had time to reach its maximum speed immediately, the difference in speeds would have put the two aircraft 3 miles apart for every minute that passed.
• Some reports state that copilot Schumaker looked down on Flight 77.[5]  How could he look down on something that was at first right in front of him, at a distance of two miles, and five minutes later was up to 15 miles (more than was possible) further ahead of him?
• And if military cargo planes could take orders from civilian ATCs, why didn’t the ATCs ask Andrews AFB to launch its at-the-ready interceptors, which could travel several times faster than the errant airliner?

It was reported that Lt. Col. O’Brien turned on the news after he witnessed Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, and that’s when he and his crew finally learned what most of us already knew—that the nation was under attack.  It was claimed by MSgt Rosenthal that, at this time, “We circled. We loitered briefly.”[6]

One of the documents released by the 9/11 Commission in response to FOIA requests is the flight tracking strip from Andrews AFB for September 11, 2001.  This tracking strip indicates that Gofer 06 took off from Andrews at 9:33 am.[7]  Given that the flight engineer for the cargo plane stated that they circled after witnessing the crash, and a large aircraft takes a few minutes to circle, we must assume that Gofer 06 could not have left the vicinity of the Pentagon any earlier than 9:41 am.

Originally the crew had planned to return to their home station in Minnesota. But then they decided “the prudent thing to do was to get to a safe haven and take a time out.”[8]  They did not go to the nearest safe haven, however, but instead continued on in an improbable path that ended in landing at Cleveland airport, approximately one hour later.

One problem with this new self-determined route taken by the Gofer 06 crew was that Benedict Sliney, the FAA’s national operations manager, had issued a ground stop at 9:42 am, just as Gofer 06 was leaving the Washington area.  Per the 9/11 Commission Report, this meant that all aircraft were ordered to land at the nearest airport. Gofer 06 did not land as required by the FAA.  Instead, it flew for another hour and passed over numerous airports in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Of course the truly amazing thing is that Gofer 06 is credited for witnessing not only the crash of Flight 77, but the smoke from the crash of Flight 93.  At 10:05, just 27 minutes after seeing the Pentagon crash, the crew of Gofer 06 witnessed black smoke from United 93 at a distance of only 17 miles.

The Andrews AFB flight tracking strip does indicate that Gofer 06’s approved flight plan was from Andrews to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.  A direct route between these two points would take the cargo plane right by Meyersdale, PA, which is in a direct line to Minneapolis/St. Paul and about 17 miles away from Shanksville.

The direct distance, as the crow flies, between the Pentagon and Shanksville is 127 miles. If we accept that Gofer 06 “circled and loitered” for only 3 minutes starting at 9:38, then it would have had just 24 minutes to reach Meyersdale, PA at 10:05, which is the time that its crew is said to have seen the black smoke from United 93 at a distance of approximately 17 miles.  At its rated cruise speed of 336 mph, Gofer 06 would have needed 23 minutes to make this trip.  So it is just barely possible.

One might ask a few more questions about this though.

• For example, of all the flight paths that an aircraft taking off from Andrews AFB might have taken, what are the odds that the one plane that was asked to tail Flight 77 just happened to be vectored directly toward the crash site of Flight 93?  Just taking the radial probability of all possible flight paths away from the Andrews/Pentagon area would seem to put the odds at 1 in 360, or about 1 in 180 for only land-based paths.

• What are the odds that this one plane that happened to be vectored directly between the crash of Flight 77 and the crash of Flight 93 would have just exactly the time needed to fly between these two historic events?  Most military aircraft and any commercial airliner would have been traveling much faster and would have missed seeing the smoke from Flight 93.  Therefore, since a C-130H is an unusual type of plane and is relatively slow, the probability would seem to drop considerably lower.

• Why did the crew of Gofer 06 immediately respond to a civilian request to follow Flight 77 but then, for nearly one hour, ignore the FAA’s national operations manager’s order to land at the closest airport?  It ultimately landed at Cleveland, another 181 miles (32 minutes at cruising speed) away, after passing by several cities including Pittsburgh.

It could be that these questions amount to nothing more than coincidence and that Gofer 06 really was just a spectacularly improbable flight on the most spectacular day in U.S. aviation history.  But another flight that took off from Andrews that morning is the center of yet another paradox.  And with regard to that flight, someone seems to either be lying or spectacularly mistaken.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, Hugh Shelton, was reported to have been one of the many national leaders who were absent or indisposed on that fateful morning. The official line is that he had taken off from Andrews AFB to fly to a NATO meeting in Hungary and was 1.5 hours out when he was told about the first WTC event.  After being told about the second plane going into WTC 2, he told his crew to turn around and go back. Apparently he had to tell them again after they heard about the Pentagon crash, possibly because they had not yet gotten clearance to fly back.[9]

In any case, Shelton’s plane, a modified C-135 called the Speckled Trout, was about two hours away from Andrews AFB when it turned around.  Yet Shelton did not return to the National Military Command Center (NMCC), where his leadership was desperately needed, until 5:40 pm. The exact time that the Speckled Trout landed has not been officially reported although it was listed in the FOIA-released document noted above.

Upon return, Shelton’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and from there, three patrol cars and about a dozen motorcycle cops escorted him and his staff to the Pentagon. It was said that when Shelton got back to the Pentagon, he initially went to his office and then visited the site of the attack to see the wreckage. After re-entering the building, he finally headed to the NMCC.

Therefore, Shelton’s account appears to say that it took him about six hours to return to the NMCC, after taking only about two hours to return to Andrews on the Speckled Trout. It seems odd that he would spend six hours (8 minus the 2 needed to fly back) in his office and examining wreckage before reporting to the command center when he was in charge.

Shelton’s 2010 autobiography, coincidentally named “Without Hesitation,” confirms this timeline and adds a few more details.  On page 433, Shelton describes what happened after his initial order to return to the U.S., when he learned of the second WTC crash.  He wrote, “Ten minutes later they called back with confirmation that we had been officially cleared to fly through the shutdown airspace. One of our pilots stuck his head out of the cockpit and announced, ‘Sir, our flight path will take us right over Manhattan, if you’d like to come up here about ten minutes from now.’”

Furthermore, Shelton elaborated on the return journey in that he claims to have flown right over the WTC site just minutes after the buildings were destroyed.  “We flew directly over what had been the Twin Towers, just a few minutes after they collapsed,” he wrote.  And then —”We vectored directly back to Andrews.”

Shelton furthered described what happened when he arrived at Andrews.  He claims that an entourage of DC patrol cars met him there and he was escorted immediately to the Pentagon, “which was still ablaze and spewing plumes of thick gray smoke.” And (interestingly) “…the smell of cordite was overwhelming.”

Suzanne Giesemann, an aide to Shelton who was on the Speckled Trout that morning, has confirmed Shelton’s account in her own book.  In this account, she reiterates that the plane was routed over the WTC site seemingly just minutes after the towers fell.  There is even a photograph of smoke rising from Ground Zero that is attributed to Shelton’s personal photographer, named Jones.[10]

Unfortunately, the September 2011 edition of Air Force Magazine, mentioned earlier, contradicts both of these accounts.[11] Another article in this issue includes comments from Captain Rob Pedersen, who was the flight navigator for Shelton’s plane on 9/11.  This article states that after Shelton instructed his pilot to return to the U.S., the crew didn’t get clearance to return for several hours.  This article also claims that the plane did not have any destination and “so we went into a holding pattern near Greenland,” Pedersen said.  The new report says that it was Pederson’s job, as the navigator, to come up with a list of alternative landing sites, the possibilities for which included Thule AB, Greenland and NAS Keflavik, Iceland.

The new article suggests that Speckled Trout finally came back through Canada hours later, but was still being denied entry to US airspace, and therefore it was placed in another holding pattern.  Pederson states that—“It took a little bit of time, and I’m sure there were a lot of phone calls made, before they let us back in.”  The article does mention that the return flight from Canada took the plane over the WTC site and that Pederson took his own photograph out one of the small windows.  It is interesting that the route through Canada and the route back over the Atlantic would both go over the WTC site, but the new story concludes that—“By early afternoon, they had made their way to Andrews.”

The flight tracking strip from Andrews AFB indicates that the Speckled Trout, call name “Trout 99,” took off at 7:09 am ET (11:09 Zulu time). The official time that Trout 99 landed back at Andrews is recorded as 4:40 pm.

Many obvious questions arise when considering these contradictory reports.

• Why does Pederson now claim that it took hours to get clearance to return when Shelton said in his book that it took only ten minutes?
• If the Speckled Trout had flown over the WTC just minutes after the buildings were destroyed, meaning before 11 am, how could it have taken nearly six hours to land at Andrews AFB?
• If Shelton’s account was true and the plane landed much earlier, what was he doing for the next six hours, before arriving at the NMCC at 5:40 pm?
• If he did not fly back until hours later after having been in a long holding pattern over Greenland and then another in Canada, why did he not mention any of this in his autobiography?  Did he not know what the plane was doing?
• How could Shelton not know the difference between “just minutes” and a period of five or six hours?
• If Shelton’s 2010 account was correct, why would Air Force Magazine make up a story in September 2011 about his plane having been delayed in Greenland for hours and not landing at Andrews until the afternoon?

These may or may not be the most critical questions to answer regarding the events of 9/11.  But the story of Gofer 06 has been used to provide evidence for the official accounts, and the question of why so many of the nation’s leaders were absent on that morning should be of great concern to anyone who is interested in the truth.  Getting to the truth will require that all such improbable scenarios and contradictions be investigated.

When Underwriters Laboratories fired me for challenging the World Trade Center (WTC) report that it helped create with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it said “there is no evidence” that any firm performed the required fire resistance testing of the materials used to build the Twin Towers. Of course, that was a lie.

The “no evidence” claim was reminiscent of comments made by President Ford to his press secretary, Ron Nessen, about Ford’s work on the Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. Ford told Nessen that he and his colleagues on the Warren Commission —“were very, very careful when we wrote our final report not to say flatly that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was not part of a conspiracy.” Ford clarified that the Warren Commission was “very careful to say we ‘found’ no evidence of a conspiracy.”[1]

With this in mind, I checked to see how many times the 9/11 Commission Report used the phrase “no evidence,” and noted in particular the times the Commission claimed to have “found no evidence” or that “no evidence was uncovered.”  I discovered that the phrase “no evidence” appears an amazing 63 times.  An example is the dubious statement—“There is no evidence to indicate that the FAA recognized Flight 77 as a hijacking until it crashed into the Pentagon (p 455).”

Of these 63 instances, some variation of “we found no evidence” appears three dozen times.  This seems to be an unusually high number of disclaimers begging ignorance, given that the Commission claims to have done “exacting research” in the production of a report that was the “fullest possible accounting of the events of September 11, 2001.”

The number of times these “no evidence” disclaimers appear in the report is doubly amazing considering how infrequently some of the most critical witnesses and evidence are referenced.  For example, the FAA’s national operations manager, Benedict Sliney, who was coordinating the FAA’s response that day, appears only once in the narrative (and twice in the notes).  And the FAA’s hijack coordinator, Michael Canavan, appears only twice in the narrative, with neither of those citations having anything to do with Canavan’s assigned role as the key link between the military and the FAA, a role whose failure the Commission says caused the attacks to succeed. Similarly, the testimony of FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who says Bin Laden worked with the U.S. government up until the day of the attacks, is mentioned only once in the notes. William Rodriguez, the WTC janitor who has publicly testified to basement level explosions, is not mentioned at all despite having given testimony to the Commission.

It seems a good idea to look more closely at the instances in which the attorneys, myth experts, and military intelligence operatives who wrote the 9/11 Commission Report said that they did not find evidence.  Here are a few of the most interesting examples.

• “We found no evidence, however, that American Airlines sent any cockpit warnings to its aircraft on 9/11.” p 11
• Concerning the hypothesis that one of the alleged hijackers was sitting in the cockpit jump seat since takeoff on Flight 93:  “We have found no evidence indicating that one of the hijackers, or anyone else, sat there on this flight.” p12
• Within minutes of the second WTC impact, Boston Center asked the FAA Command Center (Benedict Sliney’s team) to advise aircraft to heighten cockpit security, but the Commission said:  “We have found no evidence to suggest that the Command Center acted on this request or issued any type of cockpit security alert.” p 23
• With respect to requests to warn aircraft to heighten cockpit security—“While Boston Center sent out such warnings to the commercial flights in its sector, we could find no evidence that a nationwide warning was issued by the ATC system.” p 455

These first four examples highlight the little discussed fact that the 9/11 Commission did not explain how any of the alleged hijackers entered the cockpits of any of the four hijacked planes.

With regard to Flight 11 the Commission states—“We do not know exactly how the hijackers gained access to the cockpit (p 5)” and—“FAA rules required that the doors remained closed and locked during the flight.”  Based on a recording attributed to flight attendant Betty Ong, the report speculates that they might have “jammed their way in.”  One problem with this hypothesis is that the act of breaking down the locked cockpit door would certainly have given the professional flight crew plenty of time to enter the four-digit hijack “squawk code” into the transponder.  This is a simple, standard operating procedure which the crew was trained to follow but none of them accomplished.

Yet another problem is that, according to the story, Atta and his co-conspirators disagreed with the “jamming” hypothesis.  The report states that Atta “had no firm contingency plan in case the cockpit door was locked” and …”he was confident the cockpit doors would be opened and did not consider breaking them down to be a viable idea (p 245).”  These were, apparently, very bold and optimistic hijackers who walked onto the plane assuming that normal operating procedures would not be followed and who did not have any kind of back-up plan in case they were wrong.  In any case, these claims certainly seem to contradict the words of Acting Director of the FBI, Thomas Pickard, who testified that—“these 19 and their superiors operated flawlessly in their planning, communications and execution of this event. They successfully exploited every weakness from our borders to cockpit doors.”

For Flight 175, the Commission report does not describe how the alleged hijackers got into the cockpit nor does it even mention that this first critical step in a hijacking was omitted from the explanation.   Similarly, for Flight 77 and Flight 93, the alleged hijackers just appear in the cockpit and in control of the aircraft.  As with Flight 11, all three crews failed to follow the simple procedure to squawk the hijack code.

What makes this even less believable is that the Commission admits that Flight 93 received and acknowledged a warning (although not from the FAA Command Center) to secure the cockpit four minutes before the hijacking began.  This means that 37-minutes after the third plane was hijacked, and 25-minutes after the second plane crashed into the WTC, the crew of the fourth plane could not secure it’s cockpit or enter the hijack squawk code despite having four minutes warning that hijackers might try to break in.

• “Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” p 171
• Concerning the origins of the funding for the attacks, the report says—“Ultimately the question is of little practical significance.”  But it clarifies that – Similarly, we have seen no evidence that any foreign government – or foreign official – supplied any funding.”  p 172
• “We have found no evidence that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the conspiracy, either directly or indirectly.” p 498

Recently, the world’s leading insurance provider, Lloyd’s of London, filed a lawsuit alleging the exact opposite of these claims made by the 9/11 Commission.  Although Lloyd’s dropped the lawsuit just days later without explanation, one would think that at least some small amount evidence must have been available for the company to have gone to all the trouble of putting together a case and filing it against the Saudis.  If there was no such evidence, Lloyd’s could be sued for false or frivolous litigation.

Lloyd’s was not the first to contradict the Commission on this topic, however, as the many of the 9/11 victims’ relatives had joined together not long after the attacks to file a 15-count, $116 trillion lawsuit against Saudi royals, including some who were among top government leaders in Saudi Arabia.  That lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality related to the ability to sue a foreign government and, later, the Obama Administration backed the Saudis during the appeal.  What’s important to realize, however, is that it was only the 9/11 Commission that claimed no evidence for Saudi financing could be found.  Obviously, such evidence could be found, it just could not be used to prosecute the Saudi government in the United States.

• “Exhaustive investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, FBI, and other agencies have uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions.” p 172

The “exhaustive investigations” conducted by the FBI, on which the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus.  The FBI did not interview the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have had ties to al Qaeda.  The Commission’s memorandum summary suggests that the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations.  Those unilateral decisions were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades involved reasonably suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family.  Another suspect was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who were later arrested for securities-related crimes.

The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001.  According to the people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for “dirty doomsday dealings.”

The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles, from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the WTC just before it was destroyed.  Today we know that financial experts from around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that 9/11 informed trading did occur.

• “First, we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001.”  p 329
• “Second, we found no evidence of political intervention [with regard to the Saudi flights which did not occur before national airspace was reopened].”  p 329
• “We found no evidence that anyone at the White House above Richard Clarke participated in a decision about the departure of the Saudi nationals.”  [Clarke claimed—“I asked the FBI, Dale Watson, to handle that…” and “I have no recollection of clearing it with anybody at the White House.”]  p 329
• “Third, we believe the FBI conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States on chartered flights….They have concluded that none of the passengers was connected to the 9/11 attacks and have since found no evidence to change that conclusion.” and “Our own independent review of the Saudi nationals involved confirms that no one with known links to terrorism departed on those flights.”  p 329

For the 9/11 Commission to have made four separate “no evidence” claims related to the widely-reported flight of Saudi nationals out of the U.S. just after 9/11, there must have been a strong reason for this failure of “exacting research.”

Months before the Commission report was published, it was well known that numerous members of the Bin Laden family were among those flown out of the U.S. at a time when no other commercial or private flying was allowed.  “Counter-terrorism Czar” Richard Clarke was the one to make this decision, although he did not coordinate it with Dale Watson of the FBI.  Clarke’s FBI coordinator for these flights was Michael Rolince, the assistant director of the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS).

It was reported that Rolince decided the Saudis could leave the country and required only the most superficial examination of their passports and checking for their names on terrorist watch lists.  The fact that many of them were the relatives of the man accused of perpetrating the 9/11 attacks did not lead to any concern or even to basic interviews of the passengers by the FBI.

Rolince, who now works for Booz Allen Hamilton, appears to have been behind several of the inexplicable failures of the FBI to track down the alleged 9/11 conspirators before the attacks.  In 1999, the FBI failed to follow-up on information provided to Rolince about fundraising done in the U.S. by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the alleged “number 2” of al Qaeda.  In April 2001, Rolince also failed to follow-up on a memo sent to him by Dale Watson that warned of a terrorist operation that might have been the plan for the 9/11 attacks.  Dave Frasca, one of Rolince’s direct reports, was the one who disrupted the Minneapolis FBI’s attempt to search the belongings of Zacharias Mousaoui, and Rolince is apparently the one who failed to let the FBI directors know of the arrest of Mousaoui.

•  “Although Whitman told us she spoke with White House senior economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay regarding the need to get the markets open quickly” – “We found no evidence of pressure on EPA to say the air was safe in order to permit the markets to open.”  P 555

Like some of the other carefully worded claims in the Commission report, this might be technically true, but the premise is probably false.  Christine Whitman, who was director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just after 9/11, did claim that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe when it was known that was not the case.  This was probably not done for the purpose of re-opening the stock market, however.  It is far more likely that these false claims were made in order to expedite the removal of evidence at the WTC site.

In any case, interested citizens should examine the many “we found no evidence” disclaimers from the 9/11 Commission Report more closely.  Doing so leads one to a better understanding of  how false that report really is, and the Commission’s feigned ignorance of evidence might help lead us to the truth about what happened that day.

[1] Ron Nessen, It Sure Looks Different From the Inside, Playboy Press, 1978, p 59

A few years ago, I had a chance to debate the issue of 9/11 Truth on Air America radio’s Thom Hartmann show.  My opponent was Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer, an avowed supporter of the government story.  It was an interesting experience and some good information was communicated, although the format did not allow for a detailed discussion. The debate did not fully settle the question of which outrageous conspiracy theory was the most plausible, but it did provide another helpful example of how Americans are continually being asked to accept the opposite of what they know to be true.

The debate was widely anticipated in some circles, partly because it took months for Hartmann’s producer to find a legitimate defender of the official version of 9/11. Apparently those who knew something of the official story would not publicly support it, and those who would publicly support that official story didn’t know anything about it. That fact in itself is a testament to the progress made by the 9/11 Truth Movement.

After receiving an unsolicited email from Shermer, I invited him to join me for the Hartmann debate. From Skeptic Magazine’s “9/11 Conspiracies” issue in 2006, it was clear that Shermer was also unaware of many facts about 9/11, and the official explanations for the events of that day. But he was well known for his stance on the issue, and I felt this was a chance to follow-up on Hartmann’s offer. With that in mind, I approached the debate carefully, with respect for my opponent, the audience and the host.

It didn’t take long to understand Shermer’s position on 9/11. He didn’t bother with facts about the events themselves, and appeared to be motivated only through a monster-under-the-bed perception of “conspiracy theories”. Even after admitting that the official version of events is itself a conspiracy theory, he maintained that conspiracy among oil company executives and politicians is somehow unbelievable, while conspiracy solely among people who just happen to live on the last remaining oil-rich land is to be expected.

Additionally, my opponent’s performance showed that he is not what most people would call a skeptic, at least not in matters that are important to people. I had suspected this myself, and had to check the definition of skepticism to be sure. What I found was that skepticism is about questioning claims that are generally accepted, or are given by supposedly authoritative sources. Skeptics are not people who simply take contradictory positions without regard for evidence, however, and after rational discussion skeptics usually agree with the case that best fits the evidence.

At the start of our debate, Shermer responded to my own skepticism about the history of al Qaeda by suggesting that our government gets in bed with bad people all the time. At that point, I wasn’t sure whose side of the debate he was on. But it soon became clear that he was only ready to talk about the demolition hypothesis, and then only in the sense that he wanted me to prove that hypothesis. It was gratifying to know that this last remaining, relatively legitimate defender of the official story had only a few points of unsubstantiated speculation to support his supposedly reasoned skepticism.

My opponent was clearly not skeptical of any of the claims made by the only authoritative source on the topic, the U.S. government. He had no response when I asked how each and every member of the U.S. chain of command could have been indisposed for just those two hours on September 11th, or how al Qaeda could have been behind the effective stand-down of the nation’s air defenses during that time. He could not say why the 9/11 Commission left so many of the most important facts out of their report, or what it meant for US government scientists to finally admit that they could not explain the “collapse” of the Twin Towers. His final plea was that we just accept that al Qaeda did it because they said they did it, and we should take them at their word.

This strange approach to skepticism is a good example of the growing attempt by some government and corporate media representatives (Shermer also works for FOX TV) to convince us to believe the opposite of what we see and hear. We’re told that the best way to stop terrorism is to start endless wars in the Middle East, and the best way to protect our freedoms is to give up our freedoms. We’re also led to believe, paradoxically, that anyone who questions the government’s conspiracy theory is a “conspiracy theorist”.

Shermer’s take on 9/11 shows us what happens when people simply believe things without evidence.  He responded to factual information by generating diversionary questions of motivation, and by appealing to authority.  Oddly enough, Dr. Shermer deferred to Popular Mechanics, the subject of my last blog post.  In Shermer’s case, this “believing brain” approach also means making wild, and obviously false, claims such as that he had watched all of several thousand online videos during the 2-minute break in the debate, and that they all supported his contention that demolitions could never be top-down.

It is only on this absurd playing field that we can possibly accept Michael Shermer as an exemplary skeptic. His Skeptics Society is not skeptical of authoritative claims that affect the lives of average people, like 9/11 or electronic voting machines or corporate media consolidation. Instead, Shermer and his group are skeptical of random non-authoritative claims, like those about UFOs, or the belief in God. It seems possible that his skepticism has more to do with supporting business interests than it has to do with reason.

Regardless, when someone who is clearly non-skeptical is promoted as the ideal skeptic, we are being asked to take another step away from reality. That may smell like a pile of manure to some, but as a Buddhist teacher might say, it is exactly the kind of manure that we can work with. That is, when we have an opportunity to notice the root causes of our own weaknesses, the ones that ultimately cause us the most pain and suffering, we can use that opportunity to help find our way back to reality, and back to a greater truth. Therein lies the real value of 9/11 skepticism.

In the end Shermer and I did agree on one thing, and that is that the truth about 9/11 is likely to be simple. His version of simple, however, is that terrorism amounts to just so many astoundingly lucky acts of random vengeance, with the Gods of Science turning a few blind eyes here and there. On the other hand, to me the simple truth is more likely to be that terrorism is a co-opted tool, used by a powerful few to help secure their long term strategic interests. In any case, when such truth becomes not only simple but also painfully obvious, it is imperative that we all become true skeptics.

A transcript of the Air America/Thom Hartman 9/11 Truth Debate can be found at 911Research.com.

Just before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I was asked to be on National Public Radio (NPR) to represent “9/11 Skeptics.”  When I first was asked to do this, in a 40-minute call with producer Alex Kingsbury, he said I would be on from 11 am to noon ET.  That was later changed by the replacement producer to twenty minutes starting at about 11:10.  James Meigs, from Popular Mechanics, was to be on before me for a longer period.  At the last minute, I was told I’d be on for only 10 minutes and that the conservative Canadian columnist, Jonathan Kay, would also be on.

I was the only guest questioning the official reports on this show about “9/11 Skeptics” and, in the end, I was only allowed to be on the air for five minutes.  The guest host and the two supporters of the official conspiracy theory proceeded to use some form of the term “conspiracy theorist” every thirty seconds throughout the show. The host suggested that there were “thousands and thousands of conspiracy theories” but didn’t name one. Meigs made it clear that he didn’t know what thermite was composed of, and Kay claimed that no amount of thermite could bring down the WTC buildings (but, of course, office fires could). It was enough to suggest that NPR suddenly becomes National Propaganda Radio when critical national deceptions require support.

These audio clips from the show tell the story and provide an opportunity to test people’s knowledge of the facts around Popular Mechanics and its peculiar position on 9/11.