By Stephen Badhwar

It has been six years since the events of September 11, 2001. It has been 3 years since the release of the 9/11 Commission Report. Yet there appears to be a growing number of questions surrounding this seminal event.
We all heard how 19 Arab hijackers commandeered four airliners and steered three of them into their targets. The fourth was overtaken by passengers and caused to slam into a field.
We were told that Arab extremists led by Osama bin Laden had orchestrated these attacks from Afghanistan. We were told that they hate Americans because of their freedoms.

This event constituted the grossest breach of national security since Pearl Harbour. Many wondered how such a massive failure of intelligence was possible.
The American public demanded that there be an official enquiry into the attacks. The Bush Administration waffled for over a year until finally, after intense pressure from families of 9/11 victims, it awarded 14 million dollars to put together a commission.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States was founded. The Commission set out to “provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11.” It sought “to be independent, impartial, thorough, and non-partisan.”
The Final Report of the Commission came out in July 2004. It concluded that the attacks were able to succeed because of “deep institutional failings,” especially since “no one was firmly in charge.”

Not a single person was identified as being responsible, even in part, for this colossal break-down in intelligence.
To many, the story as laid out in the report made sense. It was plausible that Arab fanatics hated the US so much that they dreamed up a plan to hijack four jets and fly them into symbolic targets and cause mass devastation.

The Commission Report was initially accepted by most media in North America, and by the majority of the American and Canadian population, as being the definitive account of who perpetrated these attacks and how.
The report was right away adopted as the official story. It stuck around for a long time.

However, a poll conducted in the US by Zogby in May 2006 found that 42% believed that “the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed…critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks.”
An October 2006 Angus Reid / New York Times and CBS News poll of Americans found that 53% believed that members of the Bush Administration were hiding something.

The Commission itself has been critiqued by many as being neither independent, nor impartial, nor non-partisan.
Dr. David Ray Griffin is a Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, Emeritus, at the Claremont Graduate School of Theology in California. He is the author of 26 books and countless essays.
In 2005 he wrote a critique entitled, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions.”

The Commission was flawed by a series of conflicts of interest says Griffin. Bush appointed Philip Zelikow to serve as the Commission’s executive director. Zelikow was a Republican with such close personal, professional, and ideological ties to the Bush White House that he was virtually a member of the Bush Administration says Griffin.
The chairman, most of the commissioners, and at least half of the staff also had serious conflicts of interest. Griffin says that these conflicts undermine the ability of the commission to provide a fair and credible investigation.
Griffin claims that executive director Zelikow had so much power to shape the investigation and the final report that it compromised the entire commission.

He quotes Lorie van Auken, one of the four 9/11 widows who were responsible for pressuring Bush into forming the commission: “It’s our sense today that they [the commission] decided early on what they wanted the public to know and then they geared the hearings to fit this pre-conceived script.”
Griffin maintains that this theme is constant throughout the entire Commission Report. He claims that the commission had a story to tell and it did everything in its power to exclude anything that did not fit with this story.

In his book Griffin identifies 115 aspects of the report that do not stand up to academic scrutiny. Let’s look at just four.

One, the Commission failed to notice that alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner. The report states that Hanjour’s application to become a pilot was repeatedly rejected and that he was a “terrible pilot.” It states that Hanjour, as late as July 2001, was denied a second flight in a Cessna with an instructor since he had such poor piloting skills.
Griffin notes that the report ironically goes on to say that Hanjour was apparently assigned the difficult task of hitting the Pentagon since he was “the operation’s most experienced pilot.” The Commissioners apparently didn’t read their entire report and put two and two together.

The Commissioners did not question whether it was possible for someone who had never flown anything larger than a single engine aircraft to command a Boeing 757-200 and execute a 330-degree turn descending 2,200 feet in the space of two and a half minutes and hit the façade of the Pentagon without even marring the front lawn.
The Washington Post reported on September 12, 2001 that the pilot “executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet manoeuvre…Aviation sources said the plane was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm.” The Commission never looked into this. No real questions were asked.

Two, Griffin says that the report failed to examine the anomalies in the evidence at the Pentagon crash site. If a 60-ton Boeing 757-200 had struck the Pentagon then there should be ample evidence to suggest this. There isn’t says Griffin, and the Commission neglected to ask why.
The façade of the building did not even collapse until 30 minutes after impact. Prior to that, a photograph by US Marine Corps Corporal Jason Ingersoll shows that the entry hole was only about 6 metres across. Griffin asks how could this hole have possibly swallowed an airliner with a wing span of 39 metres and a tail height of 12 metres?

Furthermore, there was no wreckage to speak of. Ed Plaugher, the county fire chief in charge of putting out the fire at the Pentagon, reported that there were “some small pieces…but no large sections…no fuselage sections and that sort of thing.”
In hundreds of photographs there seems to be no accounting for the lack of debris from engines, wings, fuselage, tail, landing gear, seats, luggage, or bodies. There is a complete lack of evidence to suggest an airliner crash.
The Commission failed to see this or question it. Chief Plaugher’s testimony was not even cited in the report.

Three, Griffin says that the report claims that the core of each of the Twin Towers was a “hollow steel shaft” implying that the building design was weak. This he says is a complete falsification.
He corrects the record by stating that the core of each tower was composed “of 47 massive steel columns, in between which were the elevators and stairwells. At its base, each column was 14 by 36 inches, with 4-inch-thick walls. It then tapered up to ¼-inch walls in the upper floors, which had far less weight to support.”

Griffin claims that if the towers did indeed “pancake” down, as is the official explanation, then these massive steel columns should have remained standing hundreds of feet into the air. As it was, these core load-bearing members were severed sharply into dump-truck length pieces.
This defies the laws of physics. The Commission did not question this, nor did they note that the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers was an unprecedented event. It was the first time in history that a steel-framed skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire and mechanical damage. The only other example, before 9/11 or since, was the collapse of WTC Tower 7 later that afternoon.

One would expect that such an apparent catastrophic failure of building design and performance would necessitate a thorough examination of all evidence. With such a large loss of life one would reasonably expect that a comprehensive evaluation would be undertaken so as to ensure that such an event could be avoided in the future.
Instead Griffin says that the 9/11 Commission was hastily conceived, given a very short deadline, and a grossly inadequate budget. Furthermore, the commissioners were hampered by delays in getting security clearances, a general resistance on the part of federal agencies to provide documents, and the insistence that federal employees have “minders” present when they were testifying.

Four, Griffin says that the report failed to mention that there were in fact three towers that collapsed on 9/11. World Trade Center 7 was a 47-storey steel-framed skyscraper built in 1987. It sat 100 metres away from the North and South Towers. It sustained minor damage from flying debris when the Twin Towers collapsed.
There was a small fire burning in an auxiliary diesel generator room and another small fire burning on the 12th floor. At 5:20 in the afternoon the building inexplicably collapsed at free-fall speed into its own footprint.
The Commission never looked into how this could possibly have happened. Indeed, the Commission never even mentioned the fact that the tower collapsed.
To make matters worse, the steel from all three towers were quickly removed by dump-trucks and shipped to China as scrap metal before a forensic examination of the wreckage was possible. Griffin says that the Commission failed to note this fact, or to mention that it is a federal offence to remove evidence from a crime scene.

Griffin says that there is a mountain of evidence that contradict the official story. None of this evidence was even alluded to in the report.
If any one aspect of the official account is called into question it puts the whole story in jeopardy. A story is only as strong as its weakest link. Griffin has identified over one hundred and fifteen weaknesses and absurdities in the official testimony.
This puts the entire Commission Report into question. Millions of people around the world are calling for a re-opening of the 9/11 investigation. They want to see a full and independent inquiry into what really happened that day in September 2001.

An August 2005 poll by Zogby found that 66% of New York City residents want to see a new investigation into the events.
Many professionals from firefighters to scholars to pilots are demanding a new enquiry. Richard Gage is a member of the American Institute of Architects. He and 150 other architects and engineers have put their names and their credentials behind a public call for a renewed Congressional investigation.
Gage, a practicing architect for 20 years, founded Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth one year ago. Their website is at www.ae911truth.org. They believe that “the available evidence casts grave doubt on the government's official story of these ‘collapses.’”
They are lobbying Congress to re-open the investigation to finally ask the right people the right questions.

Links to video footage of lectures by Dr. David Ray Griffin can be found at www.yukon911truth.com on the videos and books page.

Stephen Badhwar is a writer living in Atlin, BC.