3.2.0 The Official Account

The official 'fable' or myth of 9/11 is as follows:

Without warning, on the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 Islamic extremists, equipped with knives and box-cutters, hijacked four domestic flights almost simultaneously. The hijackers belonged to the terrorist group al-Qaeda and no other organisation was involved. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers 1 and 2. Another was crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after the passengers tried to retake control. The Twin Towers both collapsed because of the plane impact damage and resulting fires. WTC Building 7 collapsed later in the day due to widespread fires started by burning debris from the collapse of WTC1 hitting it.

With the possible exception of the last sentence, which, because the mainstream media rarely mention it, few uninformed people know about, this is roughly what uninformed people would say when asked what happened on 9/11. It is generally accepted then that 9/11 represents:

• The worst failure of intelligence gathering in the history of the United States.
• The worst failure of border, airport and aircraft security in the history of the United States.
• The worst failure of the military defense system in the history of the United States - failure to protect the known terrorist target, the WTC, and the Pentagon, the 'best-defended building in the world'.
• The worst engineering disaster in history - the Twin Towers, each of which had been built to withstand multiple aircraft impacts, collapsed entirely within just 56 and 103 minutes.

You would think, then, given a day of such terrible failures and disasters, a thorough investigation of what went wrong would be in order. This is different to the task of assigning responsibility and finding out who was involved.

On the day of the attacks themselves, we were given an answer to the second question: Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda acted alone. With regard to the first question we were given basic explanations on the day of the attacks as well.

• The failures of intelligence and security were because "no specific threats were received".
  
• The failure of military defense was because "no-one could have imagined they would try to use planes as missile" and because NORAD was unable to scramble fighters until after 9:37am.
• The destruction of the Twin Towers was explained as a "progressive collapse" - a global collapse following a local collapse at the impact points where (according to some experts) "intense jet-fuel fires melted the steel".

The mainstream media and most of the general public accepted these basic early explanations. However, it quickly became apparent that multiple threats had been received, that a delay of over 80 minutes to scramble fighters is inexplicable, and that hydrocarbon fires, even those started by jet fuel, cannot melt steel. Within the week, the explanations had changed:

• Some threats were received, but they were not communicated to the right people, and not given the urgency they warranted. Airport security was quickly heightened and misguided recent policies (such as no longer allowing guns in airplane cockpits, and the advice given to pilots to surrender peacefully when being hijacked) were reversed.
• NORAD released a timeline showing when they had received warnings from the FAA, and when they scrambled fighters in response to them. That multiple war games were being conducted at the time of the attacks was given as a possible reason for the confusion at the FAA and NORAD. NORAD also cited problems obtaining authorisation to shoot-down hijacked aircraft if necessary; the misguided recent policy that shoot-down orders can only come from the DoD or above, was reversed.
  
• New theories, based on weakened, not melted, steel, were put forward to explain the local collapse. Within 36 hours, the BBC had an animation showing the impact of the plane, the warping and breaking off of the floor-trusses, and the buckling of the columns. Nova produced a documentary showing the 'Pancake Collapse' theory that was later endorsed in the initial investigation report by FEMA.

The nature and number of threats received by the government (including the now notorious August 6th PDB) was revealed over the months and years following attacks. Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement calculated that, even given the times of the jet fighter scrambles in the NORAD timeline, they still had enough time to have made it; it still looked like there was a stand-down. They also criticized the 'Pancake Theory' - if the floors had pancaked into each other all the way down, then you would expect that the massive central core columns would still be left standing.

With the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) and the NIST Report (2005), key aspects of the official account changed again:

• With regard to intelligence and security, there were bureaucratic failures, lack of funding and support for counter-terrorism, a lack of focus on intelligence gathering, and a lack of seriousness given to threats received. Counter-terrorism "tsar" Richard Clarke declared: "We failed you. I failed you". The Commission concluded simply that the Bush and Clinton Administrations had been "not well served" by the intelligence agencies and ultimately their was "a failure of imagination".
• The Commission gave a completely new account of the military defense failures, placing virtually all of the blame on the FAA for failing to alert NORAD to any but the first of the hijacked planes. Furthermore, a false FAA report to NORAD of a flight that no longer existed ("Phantom Flight 11") meant that fighter planes were sent on a 'wild-goose chase'.
• The NIST rejected the local collapse mechanism that FEMA had endorsed in 2002 ("Truss-Failure" theory) in favour of reviving an explanation that had been suggested shortly after the attacks but FEMA rejected - this was "Column-Failure" theory. Although they did not investigate "past the point when collapse became inevitable", the Column-Failure theory implicity also means that the pancake collapse theory is being rejected in favour of a 'pile-driver' theory, where the in-tact building is crushed down by the top of the building, instead of the floors falling after becoming detached from the columns.

FEMA (2002) gave an outline explanation for the collapse of Building 7: that fires, started by debris hitting the building during the collapse of WTC1, and accelerated by diesel fuel stored in the building, caused a central column to fail and the resulting structure to collapse completely. It did, however, say that its theory had, at best, only "a low probability of occurrence". After omitting it completely from their 2005 Report, the NIST Report on Building 7 was due in 2007 and has still not been released. According to one NIST employee: "We're having trouble getting a handle on Building 7".

Usually, when a suspect of a crime changes his story several times, it is taken as a sign of guilt and that his word should not be trusted. In this case however, the media and many members of the public, have immediately supported each new version of events. The question of why the old story is not true, and why the new story is any more true, is not asked. Questions are also not asked about why the lies were told, why no-one involved came forward at the time to say the existing story was untrue, and why no-one has been punished either for their actions on 9/11, or for their lies following it.

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