Wednesday, 13 September 2006

Conspiracies Abound

Questioning everything about 9/11

By Kurt Brighton

“The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11, And The Loss Of Liberty”

By Jim Marrs, published by The Disinformation Company

The unthinkable happened five years ago on a balmy day in September, and reams of paper as well as thousands of terrabytes have been devoted to the subject. And when something unthinkable happens, people start to look outside of the realm of the thinkable.

In addition to triggering an instantaneous clamp-down on civil liberties, the expansion of domestic spying programs unheard of since the COINTEL program of the ’60s and ’70s, billions of dollars in increased Pentagon spending, billions of dollars dumped into private defense contracts, an ongoing war against a nebulous enemy that can never be shown to have been decisively defeated, and an ongoing war in a country that had little or nothing to do with the attacks, the events of 9/11 also spawned a surfeit of conspiracy theorists.

Funny thing is, once you get past the knee-jerk dismissal of alternative theorists as wild-eyed crackpots colluding in mom’s basement while wearing tinfoil hats, there’s a lot that doesn’t add up about the government’s official story. A whole lot.

In his new book The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11, And The Loss Of Liberty, journalist and former U.S. Army service member Jim Marrs has put together a sober, meticulous and compelling look at the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, distortions and errors that are widely reported as gospel regarding the attacks. He’s backed by hundreds of credible sources, including firefighters and police officers who were at Ground Zero that day, engineers, architects, former FBI and CIA agents, politicians and high-ranking bureaucrats, as well as mainstream news stories that fell by the wayside, and independent research by accredited scholars. He also looks at the formidable war-making/surveillance machinery that was engineered in the aftermath of the attacks, as well as connecting the dots between the players and the events in a way that probably hasn’t been done under one cover before.

There are things here that most people have probably heard about, such as the Bush family’s close ties with the al-Sabbah ruling family of Saudi Arabia, and that the administration arranged to have 40 members of the bin Laden family (also Saudis) flown out of the country in the days following the attacks when all domestic flights were grounded. And everyone knows that the Bush administration fought tooth and nail to block any investigation of the attacks, finally giving in to public pressure brought to bear by the families of 9/11 victims after nearly two years of stonewalling.

But here’s some things you probably didn’t know:

• Hani Hanjour, the hijacker who is believed to have flown the 757 into the Pentagon after diving into a 7,000-foot corkscrew descent and flattening out at treetop level—a maneuver that most military pilots couldn’t even pull off in a hog like a 757—had been denied the rental of a single-engine Cessna 172 a month before 9/11. The reason: flight instructors gave him three chances—three different test flights—but he was unable to control or land the tiny craft.

• Photos taken immediately after the impact on the Pentagon, before the walls collapsed 30 minutes later show a hole that was not big enough to accommodate the girth of a 757, even if you carefully parked it there, much less slammed into it at 600 mph.

• Tapes of firefighters who made it to the 78th floor of the South Tower (the plane hit the 80th floor) indicated they were confident the fires were controllable, and mentioned no fear of imminent danger. The building fell a few minutes later.

• There are no examples of a steel-frame building collapsing due to fire alone. The 47 steel columns used in the buildings were certified to withstand temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit—the temperature of burning jet fuel—for several hours before melting. The South Tower fell in just 56 minutes. In Caracas in 2004, a 50-story steel-frame building burned for 17 hours and did not collapse.

• Dozens of witnesses, including firefighters, police officers, maintenance workers and office workers in the towers reported explosions going off on the 20th floor and below—some even prior to the planes hitting the buildings. Dozens of other witnesses outside the buildings reported seeing puffs of smoke and hearing noises indicative of demolition explosions.

• WTC 7, a 47-story building that was used by Rudolph Guiliani as a base of operations during the early part of the disaster response, collapsed on its own around 5 o’clock that afternoon. No plane hit it, and there were only small fires apparent. FEMA could offer no explanation, and rather than explain it, the 9/11 Commission declined to even mention its collapse.

• Steel from the towers was unceremoniously cut up and sold for scrap overseas before an investigation into the causes of the fire and the collapse could be conducted, an unprecedented move in any fire investigation, let alone in the single biggest modern attack to take place in the continental United States.

That’s only a small sample of the eye-popping information here, and from an author who is no stranger to covering controversial topics—Marrs is the author of the New York Times bestseller Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy—called “the mother of all John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy books” and upon which Oliver Stone’s JFK was based—and he’s the author of Alien Agenda, the bestselling UFO book in U.S. history. Question him if you will, but Marrs provides more than 400 footnotes, so those who doubt the doubters have ample opportunity to backtrack his sources. Whatever your political leanings, The Terror Conspiracy is a must-read for anyone looking to understand why so much about 9/11 makes so little sense, and it is presented in a smart, crisp manner that will keep you turning pages as if it were another Da Vinci Code.

It’s a shame it doesn’t come with a tinfoil hat though. Mine’s getting really worn out.

http://www.fortcollinsweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=139&Itemid=42

Check out my LIST OF MIHOP books:
http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2006/06/911-was-inside-job-911-books.html