The fourth anniversary brought none of the scathing attacks which had characterised the previous three years anniversary coverage of 9/11 alternative theories, but instead heralded two reviews of a new British book, “9/11 Revealed: Challenging the Facts behind the War on Terror” by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan.
The first of these reviews (unavailable on the Mail website) was published on Saturday 6th August, 2005 under the title “9/11 on Trial” by Mail journalist Tony Rennell The article begins by comparing 9/11 with a very infrequently cited document, which details US government plans to, “fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians, fool the world and provide a pretext for war…This ‘agent provocateur' plan – codenamed Operation Northwoods and revealed in official archives – dates from 1962 when the Cold War was at its height. Four decades later, there are a growing number of people who look back at this proto-conspiracy and then to the events of 9-11 and see uncanny and frightening modern parallels.”
The National Security Archive at George Washington University elaborates further on Operation Northwoods: “the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.”
By opening with the comparison of 9/11 to Operation Northwoods, Rennell avoids the ridicule of many previous articles, and sets 9/11 alternative theories in an historical context, one in which the US government contemplated carrying out covert terror operations against US citizens.
Rennell goes on to recognise that, “many of the theories are outlandish in the extreme. It would be easy to dismiss them as hokum, the invention of over-active imaginations among those whose instinct is always to find some way to blame America for the world's ills…Some would say that even in discussing such notions, we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice to the dead.”
But he counters these misgivings by admitting that, “…much of the evidence the authors present is undeniably compelling…can the idea of a 9/11 plot by those who serve the deeply mistrusted Bush really be ruled out with total certainty, without at least considering the arguments?”
The article then devotes a large section to what Henshall and Morgan claim is the, “most startling question, which remains unresolved… why the hijackers' principal target, the two 110-storey towers at the World Trade Centre in New York, crumbled so easily. No-one who watched each building suddenly cascade into dust and debris in just 20 seconds will ever forget the slow-motion horror.”
Here, Rennell makes a rare factual error, one which crucially affects how 9/11 alternative theories about the collapse of the towers are to be understood. His claim of a twenty second collapse time is contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report (Chapter 9.2 SEPTEMBER 11,2001, From 9:59 until 10:28 A.M) which states that, “At 9:58:59, the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds, killing all civilians and emergency personnel inside…” In addition, video evidence of the collapse of both towers corroborates the figure of approximately ten seconds.
The speed of the collapse is important; Rennell later writes, “That they collapsed after being hit and fell at such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture. It astonished many engineers.” Other experts mentioned by Rennell include, “expert demolition contractor from Pennsylvania , Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the buildings ‘looked like a classic controlled demolition'” whilst “Van Romero, vice-president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, reached the same opinion after studying videos of the disaster, and concluded that ‘explosive devices inside the buildings' caused them to collapse.”
These quotes follow an abundance of other speculation as to why the towers could not have collapsed by the “official explanation… known as the Pancake Effect.” Rennell notes that, “the towers had expressly been built to survive the impact of a Boeing 707, a plane the same size and carrying as much fuel as the ones that struck” and that “Some firefighters told reporters that day they thought there had been bombs in the building.”
The article then moves on to, “the collapse of a third building on the World Trade Centre site, a smaller 47-storey block known as WTC7, which was largely ignored by the world's media. It had not been hit by a plane yet it, too, mysteriously fell many hours after the Towers had gone.” Rennell continues: “…according to Henshall and Morgan, a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result of fire before this day” before noting that, “The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein, explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately demolished. He told a U.S. TV documentary that a decision was made to ‘pull' the building rather than risk loss of life, though this was later denied.
Certainly, according to Henshall and Morgan, the building's fall in seven seconds was just as textbook-tidy and suspicious as the collapse of the Twin Towers. Given that it also housed offices of the U.S. Secret Service, the CIA and the Defence Department, this has led conspiracy theorists to give it a key role in the supposed 9/11 plot…”
By devoting a prominent section of his article to the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC7 - also known as the Salomon Brothers Building – Rennell breaks new ground in articles about 9/11 conspiracy theories. Previous articles had largely ignored or ridiculed these two issues, whereas Rennell devotes time to explain some of the alleged anomalies.
The article then covers territory familiar to readers of previous alternative theory articles - the Pentagon crash - before outlining how 9/11 might have been run along the lines of Operation Northwoods: “Planes were swapped, ‘drones' slammed into the World Trade Centre (which was mined with explosives as well) and the Pentagon, and the identities of alleged hijackers from the Middle East were stolen or invented to put the blame on Al-Qaeda.”But Rennell avoids ridicule, and stresses that, “Henshall and Morgan…make it clear that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme theory of empty planes and hoax attacks…Instead of retreating into fantasy, they simply insist that something is being held back – that we have not been told the full story. And it's hard to discount all their arguments.”
Rennell also reports on the previously uncovered story, at least in relation to 9/11 alternative theories, that a wargame exercise was running on the morning of 9/11. After devoting a small section to the slow response of the US military, Rennell contends that, “One explanation for this paralysis is that there was, as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on in U.S. airspace that same day, codenamed Vigilant Guardian. The air traffic controllers were confused by this, thinking the planes disappearing from their screens might be part of the exercise. Coincidence? No, say the 9/11 sceptics.” Leaving aside Rennell’s reporting of the wargame exercise, it should also be noted that several times throughout the article he uses the language adopted by Henshall and Morgan to describe 9/11 alternative theorists: 9/11 sceptics, although the term conspiracy theory is still prevalent.
Rennell also attempts to explain some of the terms used by 9/11 alternative theorists: “two types of government-inspired plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known as ‘LIHOP' and ‘MIHOP'” (Let it Happen on Purpose, and Make it Happen on Purpose).The article moves towards it’s conclusion by noting a further, “catalogue of unanswered questions” such as, “How…did the hijackers manage to slip past airport security with weapons?” and the “phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and Morgan's book say it is all but impossible to make a mobile phone call above 8,000 feet – let alone four times that altitude, as the jet passengers are alleged to have done.”
Rennell concludes the section on unanswered questions with a fair appraisal of “9/11 Revealed”, and of 9/11 alternative theorists in general: “This call for transparency is the thrust of their whole argument. It is time, they say, for a full and truly independent inquiry into 9/11 that will reveal all the facts and silence the rumours.”
The article concludes by dealing with Henshall and Morgan’s analysis of the largely forgotten anthrax attacks which occurred in the months following 9/11. “The letters mysteriously stopped,” writes Rennell, “and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as a particular strain stemming only from the government's own labs in Maryland.”
Rennell’s final sentences mirror the cautious, yet interested and fair tone of the article as a whole: “With public trust one of the major casualties of the war, can any of us be absolutely sure we have not been caught up in a lie, and perhaps a bigger one even than we ever thought possible? In their enquiries, Henshall and Morgan may have discovered no smoking gun – but they have certainly left a whiff of something sinister in the air.”
Times
A much shorter and slightly more critical article of 9/11 alternative theories followed on 4th September, 2005 in a book review by Nick Fielding of the Times. It was simply titled, “Terrorism: 9/11 Revealed: Challenging the Facts behind the War on Terror by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan”
Fielding first notes some of the events which were, “grist to the conspiracy theorists’ mill” such as “The “miraculous” recovery of lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s passport from the ruins of the World Trade Center, the spotting of a team of Israelis who cheered as they filmed the incident in New York, the odd behaviour of George W Bush.”
Here Fielding makes a minor factual error: it was actually Satam-al-Suqami’s passport which was recovered from nearby the World Trade Center, although many 9/11 alternative websites report incorrectly that it was Mohammed Atta’s. The 9/11 Commission (Staff Statements, page 21) noted that, “Suqami’s passport survived the attack: a passerby picked it up from the World Trade Center and handed to a New York Police Department detective shortly before the towers collapsed.”
He then makes another, more important factual error, claiming that, “One of the strongest (and unsubstantiated) theories to emerge suggested that millions of dollars had been made by speculators on the New York stock exchange who had advance knowledge of the campaign.”
Yet, according to the 9/11 Commission (Note 130), “Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation... A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10.”
But despite these errors, Fielding, like Rennell, differentiates between, “allowing the attacks to happen — or in the case of the most extreme theories, by organising them under a ‘false flag’”. In addition to mentioning ‘false flag’, a key term in the 9/11 alternative theory lexicon, Fielding discusses “the military-industrial complex in America, headed by Dick Cheney and his neocon supporters in the Project for a New American Century” judged by most 9/11 alternative theorists to be the key suspects in the 9/11 attacks.
Although Fielding doesn’t reference Operation Northwoods, probably the closest historical to 9/11 in the eyes of the alternative theorists, he does mention, “previous occasions where America has invented incidents to justify continuing hostilities, such as during the Spanish-American conflict or the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam war.”
Fielding then edges closer to ridicule by using one of the more controversial theories amongst 9/11 conspiracy theories. He writes, “A recent DVD from the Blackpool 9/11 Truth Group, for example, states the following: ‘The two planes which flew into the towers are American KC737 in-flight refuel tankers fitted with missile pods and not passenger airliners.’”However, this is later tempered by a statement which Henshall and Morgan actually used for the back cover blurb of “9/11 Revealed”. Fielding wrote, “The authors of Revealed, both radical journalists, have subjected the official version of what happened to intense scrutiny and found huge gaps.”
He concludes, “You don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to see that the official account published by the 9/11 Commission is full of gaps. The interesting question is whether or not all such incidents are, ultimately, unknowable or whether the public has been misled. Take your pick.”
Overall, the article covers many of Henshall and Morgan’s theses fairly and rationally. Both articles largely avoid simply ridiculing or ignoring 9/11 alternative theories like so many before them. The fourth anniversary was certainly a watershed moment in media coverage of 9/11 alternative theories.
2006 - Charlie Sheen - Challenge me on the Facts
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