| The plot by America’s
military bosses was devilish in both design and intent
– to fabricate an outrage against innocent civilians,
fool the world and provide a pretext for war. In the Pentagon,
a top secret team drew up a plan to simultaneously send
up two airliners painted and numbered exactly the same,
one from a civil airport in America, the other from a
secret military airbase nearby.
The one from the airport would have military personnel
on board who had checked in as ordinary passengers under
false names. The one from the airbase would be an empty
drone, a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft.
Somewhere along their joint flight paths, the passenger-carrying
plane would drop below radar height, and disappear, landing
back at the airbase and unloading its occupants in secret.
Meanwhile, the drone would have taken up the other plane’s
designated course. High over the island of Cuba, it would
be exploded in mid-air after broadcasting an international
distress call that it was under attack from enemy fighters.
The world would be told that a plane load of blameless
American holidaymakers had been deliberately shot down
by Fidel Castro’s Communists – and that the
US had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.
This ‘agent provocateur’ plan – code
named 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.
For Cuba, read Iraq, say these skeptics. For the dummy
airliner, read the Twin Towers in New York.
The Northwoods plan is crucial to the argument presented
in a hugely provocative – many would say fantastical
– yet, at times, genuinely disturbing new analysis
of 9/11 by two radical British based journalists, Ian
Henshall and Rowland Morgan.
Did the CIA actively help the hijackers?
In it, they examine various conspiracy theories that
suggest the Bush administration connived in the devastating
aerial attacks on New York and Washington four years ago.
The reason? To give Bush the excuse he wanted to push
ahead with his secret, long-held plane to invade Iraq
and capture its oilfields.
As we shall see. Many of the theories they raise 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.
Are we really supposed to believe that the CIA actively
helped the hijackers succeed – or even that the
US government staged the whole attack and itself murdered
thousands of its own citizens?
Some would say that even in discussing such notions,
we are lending comfort to terrorists and doing a disservice
to the dead.
However, much of evidence the authors present is undeniably
compelling – and their arguments sound rather less
preposterous in the light of OPERATION NORTHWOODS all
those years ago. That plan was proposed in all seriousness
by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in a memo to
the Secretary of Defence. It got as far as the Attorney
General – Robert Kennedy, brother of the president,
John Kennedy, before being vetoed.
It is proof, says Henshall and Morgan, that forces at
the top of the US Government are capable of conceiving
a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their
own secret ends – even under such a supposedly ‘nice
guy’ president as JFK.
In which case, 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?
Of course, the official explanation for 9/11 is that
Al Qaeda just got lucky that sunny morning in September
2001.
The terrorists conducted their attacks without outside
help, by this account, and intelligence and other blunders
by the US authorities that contributed to their terrible
success – for example, ignored warnings that an
attack involving aeroplanes was likely, or issuing US
entry visas to 19 Islamic fanatics set on murder –
were just that: blunders.
This is the White House’s version and it was endorsed
by a Washington commission of inquiry under Thomas Kean
published last year.
But, according to Henshall and Morgan, the story is full
of gaping holes and unanswered questions. And the most
startling question, which remains unresolved, they say,
is 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. But now the question is asked: was
it all too pat, too neat?
Though 30 years old, 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. That they collapsed after being hit and fell at
such speed was unprecedented in the history of architecture.
It astonished many engineers.
The official explanation is known as the Pancake Effect
– steel supports melting in the intense fireball,
causing the floors to tumble down on each other.
The problem here is that the heat from the explosions
was probably not nearly as great as people tend to assume.
There was indeed a lot of kerosene from the aircraft
fuel tanks when flight 11 from Boston hit the North Tower
between the 94th and the 98th floors but pictures show
that most of this fireballed outwards. Experts have questioned
whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the buildings’
steel frames.
Oddly, too, original estimates by firefighters after
the second plane, Flight 175, hit the South Tower, were
that the blaze was containable.
Two firefighters actually reached
the crash zone on the 78th floor and a tape exists of
them radioing down that just two hoses would be enough
to get the fire under control – in which case the
situation should have been little different from a ‘normal’
office fire, and no steel tower ever collapsed as the
result of such a blaze.
‘The fire wasn’t hot enough
to cause a collapse’
Kevin R Ryan, laboratory director at a US underwriting
firm specializing in product safety, was sacked from his
job last year after questioning the official explanation.
“The buildings should have easily
withstood the thermal stress caused by the burning jet
fuel”, he said. “If steel did soften or melt,
this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind,
let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That
fact should be of great concern to all Americans.”
Intriguingly, Ryan claimed that his firm
had checked and approved the steel used in the towers
when they were built. This was later vehemently denied
by the bosses who sacked him.
To add to the mystery, the tape of the two firemen was
kept secret and when relatives were finally allowed to
listen to it, they had to sign strict confidentiality
agreements.
If the Pancake Effect theory is wrong, there’s
one obvious alternative: that the towers were brought
down by the sheer impact of the planes hitting them. But
this, according to the skeptics, ignores basic physics.
The initial hit on the North Tower, for example, destroyed
33 of the 59 columns in its north face. This meant the
damage was asymmetrical, so any resulting collapse would
surely have been lopsided.
In fact, the building fell evenly. The TV aerial on the
summit sank vertically, in a straight line.
There were other strange anomalies. According to the
Kean Commission, when the first plane struck: ‘A
jet fuel fireball erupted and shot down a bank of elevators,
bursting into numerous lower floors, including the lobby
level, and the basement four storeys below ground.’
Unlikely, say Henshall and Morgan. A firm by a French
documentary crew, who by chance were following a New York
firefighting team that day, shows the first men arriving.
The lobby was covered in fine debris and the windows were
shattered but there was none of the soot or oily residue
that burning jet fuel would have left behind.
Meanwhile down in the basement, a 50-ton hydraulic press
was reduced to rubble and a steel and concrete fire door
demolished. Witnesses there said
the destruction was less like that from a fireball flash
and more like that from a bomb.
Some firefighters told reporters that day that they thought
there had been bombs in the building – before apparently
being silenced by their chiefs. So had Al Qaeda cleverly
placed explosives inside the towers as well as attacking
them from the air?
Or, as conspiracy theorists would have it, had some homegrown
agency mined the towers to make sure they fell –
but neatly without collapsing over the rest of Manhattan,
America’s financial and business heartland?
The authors quote an expert demolition contractor from
Pennsylvania, Michael Taylor, who said the fall of the
buildings ‘looked like a controlled demolition’.
Another expert, 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.
Strangely and without explanation, he
recanted that view just ten days after going public with
it. Might he possibly have been leaned on?
Even stranger, say Henshall and Morgan, was 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.
The official explanation for this was that fuel stores
caught fire as a result of debris from the burning towers,
the building began to bulge in one corner, and after that
it was unsalvageable.
But remember that, according to Henshall and Morgan,
a steel-framed building had never collapsed as a result
of a fire before this day. And, again according to the
authors, WTC7 appears almost untouched by fire in photographs
taken at the time.
The landlord of the World Trade Centre site, Larry Silverstein,
explicitly suggested at one point that WTC7 was deliberately
demolished. He told a US TV documentary that a decision
was taken 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 US 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 –
as we will see shortly.
Part of the whole problem, according to Henshall and
Morgan, is that vital evidence about what happened was
destroyed or muddied in the wake of the atrocity.
One expert said there were bombs inside
the towers
Ground Zero, the base of the towers, was fiercely protected
by the authorities – understandably so because it
not only contained human remains but a cache of seized
drugs held in an FBI office and more than $1 billion of
gold from bank vaults in the Buildings.
Yet what went on behind all the heavy security?
After most air disasters, the wreckage of the planes
is meticulously gathered up and pieced together in search
of clues.
Extraordinarily, in the course of removing
the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby landfill site,
the 9/11 salvage operation seems to have ‘lost’
four six-ton aircraft engines, besides failing to find
the ‘black box’ flight data recorders and
cockpit voice recorders from either of the planes.
These data boxes – which could have revealed exactly
what happened in the doomed jets – are deliberately
designed to withstand heavy impacts and exceptionally
high temperatures. It is, according to experts, very rare
for them not to be recovered after an accident.
Unfortunately, according Henshall and Morgan, there was
a singular lack of official zeal even to establish the
very basic fact that the aircraft that hit the Twin Towers
were the same as those that took off from Boston.
Perhaps, with almost the entire world watching the attacks
on TV, it hardly seemed necessary to prove the glaringly
obvious. But this failure to follow standard procedures
for accident investigation once again gave encouragement
to the conspiracy theorists.
And then there was the oddity of the
single passport. The black boxes may have been destroyed
and steel girders melted – yet somehow one of the
hijackers’ passports avoided this inferno and was
found intact in a nearby street by ‘a passer-by’.
To Henshall and Morgan, that seems absurd, as does the
almost instant identification of this person as a hijacker
rather than a passenger or a Twin Towers office worker.
Conspiracy theorists suspect the passport was planted
to help establish the official story in the first, critical
hours after the disaster.
Why didn't fighter planes intercept
the hijackers?
Still more unanswered questions surround what happened
at the Pentagon in Washington, in the third successful
terrorist attack that day.
After taking off from Dulles Airport, Washington, American
Airlines Flight 77 dropped off the radar screens for 36
minutes when its transponders sending signals back to
air traffic control were switched off.
When the blip reappeared, it was closing on the city
but where precisely the aircraft had been for the past
half an hour was a mystery. Nor could anyone in air traffic
control figure out what it was.
Experienced officials apparently watched its speed and
maneuverability and thought it must be a military plane.
Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely what it
was.
In a repeat of New York, no evidence
has ever been produced from the wreckage to prove that
it was Flight 77 that hurtled into the side of the Pentagon
at 350mph.
Photographs show that the hole it made was large enough
for the fuselage of a Boeing 757 but not for the wings
and the tail, though these supposedly disappeared through
the gap and then vapourised.
For the conspiracy theorists, this points to a conclusion
that what hit was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.
Some witnesses claim the plane they say hit the Pentagon
was a small one, an eight – or 12-seater, and that
it did not have the roar of an airliner but the shrill
whine of a fighter plane. One witness is convinced it
was a missile.
The authors say the matter could be cleared up by CCTV
footage of the crash from a nearby filling station, a
hotel and traffic surveillance cameras. Unfortunately,
the FBI seized all three videos within minutes of the
crash and they have never been released.
The hole in the Pentagon was too small
for a Boeing
If they were produced, they might lay to rest the theory
that what hit the Pentagon was a military drone painted
in airline livery and that just before impact it fired
a missile to enable a clean entry which would explain
the lack of debris. But until they are, the skeptics will
continue to have a field day.
In essence, to the extreme conspiracy theorists, what
took place on 9/11 was a repeat of the aborted OPERATION
NORTHWOODS.
Far from being an attack by Islamic terrorists, they
say, the events were a complete hoax, a conjuring trick
by the US government in just the same way that Kennedy’s
generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba.
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.
Along with the ‘passengers’ who apparently
boarded the planes, the ‘suicide hijackers’
are now either dead or living under different identities,
just as the pentagon planned fro the military personnel
it was going to use back in 1962.
The theory seizes on the fact that, like the plane that
apparently hit the Pentagon, both Flight 11 and Flight
175 switched off their transponders on their way to the
Twin Towers and disappeared from Radar screens. According
to the skeptics, this gave them time and opportunity to
land at the handily located Griffiss Air Force Base, a
Pentagon command center which also houses research laboratories
into advanced computers and radar. There, they were supposedly
replaced by remote-controlled substitutes.
In technical terms, this is not as far fetched as it
sounds. The US military experimented with unmanned aircraft
as far back as World War II and there have been successful
jet models since. Well-connected conspirators, so the
theory goes, would have little difficulty getting their
hands on a system to fit in an airliner.
The switch would supposedly be foolproof because, as
we have seen, the aircraft in the ruins would not be properly
identified.
Then there was the smaller building known as WTC7. It
was the obvious point from which to run the New York end
of the scam, guiding the planes into their target. Afterwards,
of course, the evidence had to be destroyed, hence its
demolition.
Taken as a rush, and without looking at the detail this
might seem vaguely plausible. But could we really have
been so totally and utterly conned?
Common sense says no. An operation of such intricacy
and complexity would require the co-operation –
and the silence until death – of thousands of people.
Everything we have read about the victims on the planes,
and their heartbroken relatives, would be a carefully
constructed sham.
It might just be possible in a totalitarian society but
surely not in a flawed yet robust democracy like America.
And with four missions (the hijackers of the fourth plane,
Flight 93, were overthrown by its passengers), not just
one as in OPERATION NORTHWOODS? No.
To be fair to Henshall and Morgan, they make it clear
that they themselves are not advocating such an extreme
theory of empty planes and hoax attacks.
They admit the Pentagon’s radar reconstructions
suggest the planes were not switched, and that alleged
Al Qaeda ringleaders are said by their interrogators to
have confirmed the official account.
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.
Why, they ask, were air traffic controllers so slow to
report suspected hijackings to the military that day in
breach of standard procedures, with the result that fighter
planes arrived too late to intercept?
Flight controllers in four separate incidents were unaccountably
slow to realize that something was wrong and alert the
military authorities. Even after one plane was definitely
known to have been hijacked, they failed to respond promptly
when others went missing.
The air force scrambled from the wrong
base
For some reason, too, when fighter planes eventually
were scrambled to New York, they were from an airbase
150 miles away, rather than the much closer one in New
Jersey. The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.
All the while the local TV channels were
smoothly getting eye-in-the-sky helicopters into the air
over the World Trade Centre. In the words of the authors:
“Their routine mobilizations stand in stark contrast
to the apparent impotence and indecisiveness of the $350-billion-a-year
US military."
Yet for all the shortcomings of the Federal Aviation
Authority and the US Air Force that day, no-one was ever
fired or reprimanded.
One explanation for this paralysis is that there was,
as fate would have it, an air defence exercise going on
in US 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. This was exactly
the sort of smokescreen operation that anyone wanting
to make life easier for the hijackers would launch to
paralyse any authorities that might get in the way.
When the first evidence came that hijackings were taking
place, traffic control officials wasted valuable time
wondering whether or not this was part of the Vigilant
Guardian exercise.
Suck a smokescreen fits well with two types of government-inspired
plot postulated by 9/11 sceptics – popularly known
as ‘LIHOP’ and ‘MIHOP’.
‘LIHOP’ – ‘Let It Happen On Purpose’
– holds that since the turn of the new century,
radical right-wingers in Washington (the so-called neo-cons)
had been keen to get a US military presence in the Middle
East oilfields and were also desperate to do something
about Al Qaeda, which had been targeting US interests
overseas.
When evidence came in of an impending terrorist attack,
they decided to ignore it. They intended that it should
succeed. It would act at the very least as a ‘wake-up’
call to their apathetic fellow countrymen and at best
as an excuse for war.
In the much the same way, some historians believe, President
Roosevelt knew in advance from broken codes about the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 – but let
it happen, at the cost of 2,400 lives, because he wanted
an excuse to join World War II.
‘MIHOP” takes a step on from this –
‘Make it Happen On Purpose’. This theory has
the same motivation but the active involvement of US agents.
Planted in Al Qaeda, they helped organize the plot, or
at the very least cleared a path for the hijackers.
These agents may even have tried to keep down casualty
figures, which some think were suspiciously small in the
circumstances.
The plane that hit the Pentagon was seen
to swerve at the last minute and hit an area of the building
that was largely unoccupied – and which had just
been fitted with reinforced external walls and blast-resistant
windows. A crash into the other side would have killed
and maimed many thousands instead of just 125.
In New York, too, more than 50,000 inhabitants of the
Towers were targeted but just 2,600 killed – not
least because of the orderly way in which the buildings
collapsed, after most of the occupants had been evacuated.
Was this an example of a ‘managed’ atrocity?
For most observers, the idea of US involvement
in the attacks still strains credulity beyond breaking
point. Yet that catalogue of unanswered questions remains
troubling.
Some are very basic. How, for example, did the hijackers
manage to slip past airport security with weapons?
The White House explanation is plastic
knives, but there has never been any independent confirmation
of how the men were armed. Some passengers who made phone
calls from the doomed planes said they witnessed stabbings
but others spoke of bombs and even guns being used.
To some, the official recourse to ‘plastic knives’
smacks of a cover-up to conceal security lapses –
or worse, a deliberate turning of blind eyes.
So how did the passengers make those
phone calls?
Another problem here is those very 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.
So how were these calls on which so much of the 9/11
narrative has been built ever made? Could they possibly
have been invented?
The authors write: ‘Few
issues cause as much controversy amongst 9/11 sceptics
as these, not least because they were cited – by
Tony Blair among others – as eyewitness reports
and proof positive the official narrative was true.’
Doubts are even raised over the gung-ho story of Flight
93, the fourth plane in the attacks, which passengers
apparently seized back from the hijackers, causing it
to crash into a field but miss Washington.
The legend of the heroic cockpit-storming,
launched to cries of ‘Let’s Roll’, was
a product of tapes that have never been authenticated
or released to anyone other than the victims’ relatives,
who were sworn to secrecy.
Henshall and Morgan say the matter could be cleared up
if recordings or billing evidence from phone companies
were produced but they never have been.
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.
One thing it could consider would be the anthrax attack
on America three weeks after 9/11. Five recipients of
contaminated letters died, postal facilities were closed,
as were office buildings on Capitol Hill where hundreds
of lawmakers and staff were tested and given an antibiotic.
At the time, this was seized on by the Washington power-brokers
pressing for action against Iraq. ‘Who but Saddam
Hussein could have supplied Arab terrorists with anthrax,’
they asked.
By contrast, skeptics about 9/11 see
this as this finishing touch to the grand plot –
an attempt to distract attention from any doubts about
the atrocities and the lessons to be learned from them.
They may have a case. The letters mysteriously stopped
and the anthrax spores were identified by scientists as
a particular strain stemming only from the government’s
own labs in Maryland.
But by then the scare had shut down congress at a crucial
time, when questions about 9/11 were beginning to surface,
and helped deepen the mood of fear and paranoia among
ordinary Americans.
It was those fears, say the skeptics, that Bush exploited
to get his way on Iraq. Had he plotted it that way all
along? Henshall and Morgan raise enough awkward points
to make it a thought that cannot simply be laughed out
of court.
After all, Bush and Blair, took us to
war assuring us that ‘the Iraq regime continues
to possess some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’.
Yet those weapons of mass destruction have not been found
and many doubt they existed.
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 though possible?
In their inquiries Henshall and Morgan may have discover
no smoking guns – but they have certainly left a
whiff of something sinister in the air.
9/11 Revealed: Challenging The Facts Behind The War On
Terror, by Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan is published
by Robinson on August 25 at £8.99. To order a copy
(P&P free), Telephone 0870 161 0870 |
