Published in the Daily
Mail, August 6, 2005
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
U.S. had no choice but to declare war and topple his regime.
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.
For Cuba , read Iraq , say
these sceptics. 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.
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 plans
to invade Iraq and capture its oil fields.
As we shall see, 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.
Are we really supposed to
believe that the CIA actively helped the hijackers succeed – or even
that the U.S. 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 the
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 Staffs 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, say Henshall
and Morgan, that forces at the top of U.S. government are capable of
conceiving a deadly, devious and fraudulent plan to further their
own secret ends – even under 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 U.S. authorities that contributed
to their terrible success – for example, ignoring warnings that an
attack involving aeroplanes was likely; or issuing U.S. 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 most of this fireballed outwards . Experts have
questioned whether the fire ever got hot enough to melt the
building's 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.
Kevin R. Ryan, laboratory
director at a U.S. 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 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 sceptics, ignores basic physics.
The initial hit on the
North Tower , for example, destroyed 33 of 59 columns in its north
face. That 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 onto numerous lower floors, including the lobby
level, and the basement four storeys below ground.'
Unlikely, say Henshall and
Morgan. A film 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 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 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 classic 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 the 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 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 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 – 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.
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 the search of clues.
Extraordinary, in the
course of removing the rubble from the Twin Towers to a nearby
landfill site, the 911 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 to
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 the ones 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
hijacker's 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.
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 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 manoeuvrability and thought it must
be a military plane. Conspiracy theorists maintain this is precisely
what it was.
In a repeat of New York ,
no clear 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 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 vaporized.
For the conspiracy
theorists, this points to the conclusion that what hit the Pentagon
was not Flight 77, and not even a jetliner.
Some witnesses claim the
plane they saw 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 confiscated all three videos within minutes
of the crash and they have never been released.
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 U.S. government in just the same way that
Kennedy's generals wanted to fool the world over Cuba .
Planes were swopped,
‘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 for 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 centre
which also houses research laboratories into advanced computers and
radar. There, they were supposedly replaced by remote-controlled
substitutes.
In technological terms,
this is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The U.S. 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 had 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 at 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 planes and 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.
For some reason, too, when
fighter planes eventually were scrambled to New York , they
were from an airbase 150 miles away, rather than a much closer one
in New Jersey . The Twin Towers were ablaze before they got there.
All this 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 U.S.
military.'
Yet for all the
shortcomings of the Federal Aviation Authority and the U.S. 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 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. 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 hijacking were taking place, traffic control officials
wasted valuable time wondering whether or not this was part of the
Vigilant Guardian exercise.
Such 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 century, radical
Right-wingers in Washington (the so-called neo-cons) had been keen
to get a U.S. military presence in the Middle East oilfields and
were also desperate to do something about Al Qaeda, which had been
targeting U.S. 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 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 U.S. 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 any 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 U.S. 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.
Another problem here is
those very phone calls from the planes. Experts in Henshall and
Morgan's 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 those 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 recording 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 critical 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
sceptics, that Bush exploited to get his war 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
ever 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 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.
¦ 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