ARTICLE TITLE: The of 9-11 conspiracy

ARTICLE AUTHORS: he New Pearl Harbor by Massimo Mazzucco

ARTICLE URL:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1GCeuSr3Mk
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7mDXHn_byA
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DegLpgJmFL8

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE: (2013)

ARTICLE: There are many conspiracy theories that attribute the planning and

execution of the September 11 attacks against the United States to parties other
than, or in addition to, al-Qaeda, including that there was advance knowledge of
the attacks among high-level government officials. Government investigations
and independent reviews have rejected these theories. Proponents of these
theories assert that there are inconsistencies in the commonly accepted version,
or evidence that was either ignored or overlooked.
The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin
Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled
demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another
prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements
from inside the U.S. government or that a commercial airliner was allowed to do
so via an effective stand-down of the American military. Possible motives
claimed by conspiracy theorists for such actions include justifying the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq (even though the U.S. government concluded Iraq was
not involved in the attacks) to advance their geostrategic interests, such
as plans to construct a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. Other
conspiracy theories revolve around authorities having advance knowledge of the
attacks and deliberately ignoring or assisting the attackers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the technology
magazine Popular Mechanics have investigated and rejected the claims made
by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. The 9/11 Commission and most of the civil
engineering community accept that the impacts of jet aircraft at high speeds in
combination with subsequent fires, not controlled demolition, led to the collapse
of the Twin Towers, but some groups, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11
Truth, disagree with the arguments made by NIST and Popular Mechanics.
9/11 conspiracy theorists reject one or both of the following facts about the 9/11
attacks:

Al-Qaeda suicide operatives hijacked and crashed United Airlines Flight

175 and American Airlines Flight 11 into the twin towers of the World Trade
Center, and crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The impact
and resulting fires caused the collapse of the Twin Towers and the destruction
and damage of other buildings in the World Trade Center complex. The
Pentagon was severely damaged by the impact of the airliner and the resulting
fire. The hijackers also crashed a fourth plane into a field near Shanksville,
Pennsylvania after the passengers and flight crew attempted to regain control of
the aircraft.

Pre-attack warnings of varying detail of the planned attacks against the United
States by al-Qaeda were ignored due to a lack of communication between
various law enforcement and intelligence personnel. For the lack of interagency
communication, the 9/11 report cited bureaucratic inertia and laws passed in the
1970s to prevent abuses that caused scandals during that era, most notably
the Watergate scandal. The report faulted both the Clinton and
the Bush administrations with "failure of imagination".

This consensus view is backed by various sources, including:

 The reports from government investigations – the 9/11 Commission

Report (that incorporated intelligence information from the
earlier FBI investigation (PENTTBOM) and the Joint Inquiry of 2002), and
the studies into building performance carried out by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST).
 Investigations by non-government organizations that support the
accepted account – such as those by scientists at Purdue University.
 Articles supporting these facts and theories appearing in magazines such
as Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and Time.
 Similar articles in news media throughout the world, including The Times
of India, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the BBC, Le
Monde, Deutsche Welle, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC),
and The Chosun Ilbo of South Korea.
 Since the attacks, a variety of conspiracy theories have been put forward
in Web sites, books, and films. Many groups and individuals advocating
9/11 conspiracy theories identify as part of the 9/11 Truth movement.
Within six hours of the attack, a suggestion appeared on an Internet chat
room suggesting that the collapse of the towers looked like an act of
controlled demolition. "If, in a few days, not one official has mentioned
anything about the controlled demolition part," the author wrote, "I think
we have a REALLY serious problem." The first theories that emerged
focused primarily on various perceived anomalies in the publicly available
evidence, and proponents later developed more specific theories about
an alleged plot. One false allegation that was widely circulated by e-mail
and on the Web is that not a single Jew had been killed in the attack and
 that therefore the attacks must have been the work of the Mossad, not
Islamic terrorists. Similar e-mail narratives claimed that all Arab taxi
drivers were absent in downtown Manhattan that morning.
 The first elaborated theories appeared in Europe. One week after the
attacks, the "inside job" theory was the subject of a thesis by a researcher
from the French National Centre for Scientific Research published in Le
Monde. Other theories sprang from the far corners of the globe within
weeks. Six months after the attacks, Thierry Meyssan's piece on
9/11, L'Effroyable Imposture, topped the French bestseller list. Its
publication in English (as 9/11: The Big Lie) received little attention, but it
remains one of the principal sources for "trutherism". 2003 saw the
publication of The CIA and September 11 by former German state
minister Andreas von Bülow and Operation 9/11 by the German journalist
Gerhard Wisnewski; both books are published by Mathias Bröckers, who
was at the time an editor at the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung.
 While these theories were popular in Europe, they were treated by the
U.S. media with either bafflement or amusement, and they were
dismissed by the U.S. government as the product of anti-Americanism. In
an address to the United Nations on November 10, 2001,
President George W. Bush denounced the emergence of "outrageous
conspiracy theories that attempt to shift the blame away from the
terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty."
 The 9/11 conspiracy theories started out mostly in the political left but
have broadened into what New York magazine describes as "terra
incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties countercultural distrust
with the don't-tread-on-me variety".
 By 2004, conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks began to
gain ground in the United States. One explanation is that the rise in
popularity stemmed more from growing criticism of the Iraq War and the
newly re-elected President George W. Bush than from any discovery of
new or more compelling evidence or an improvement in the technical
quality of the presentation of the theories. Knight Ridder news theorized
that revelations that weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Iraq, the
belated release of the President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001, and
reports that NORAD had lied to the 9/11 Commission, may have fueled
the conspiracy theories.
 Between 2004 and the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks in
2006, mainstream coverage of the conspiracy theories increased. The
U.S. government issued a formal analysis by the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) of the collapse of the World Trade
Center. To address the growing publicity of the theories, the State
Department revised a webpage in 2006 to debunk them. A 2006 national
security strategy paper declared that terrorism springs from "subcultures
of conspiracy and misinformation," and that "terrorists recruit more
 effectively from populations whose information about the world is
contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy theories. The
distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge
popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda." Al-Qaeda has
repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, with chief deputy Ayman
al-Zawahiri accusing Shia Iran and Hezbollah of
denigrating Sunni successes in hurting America by intentionally starting
rumors that Israel carried out the attacks.
 Some of the conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks do not
involve representational strategies typical of many conspiracy theories
that establish a clear dichotomy between good and evil, or guilty and
innocent; instead, they call up gradations of negligence and complicity.
Matthias Bröckers, an early proponent of such theories, dismisses the
commonly accepted account of the September 11 attacks as being itself
a conspiracy theory that seeks "to reduce complexity, disentangle what is
confusing," and "explain the inexplicable".
 Just before the fifth anniversary of the attacks, mainstream news outlets
released a flurry of articles on the growth of 9/11 conspiracy theories, with
an article in Time stating that "[t]his is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a
mainstream political reality." Several surveys have included questions
about beliefs related to the September 11 attacks. In 2008, 9/11
conspiracy theories topped a "greatest conspiracy theory" list compiled
by The Daily Telegraph. The list was ranked by following and traction.
 In 2010, the "International Center for 9/11 Studies," a private organization
that is said to be sympathetic to conspiracy theories, successfully sued
for the release of videos collected by NIST of the attacks and
aftermath. According to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
the videos that were published shortly before the ninth anniversary of the
attacks provide "new food for conspiracy theorists." Many of the videos
show images of 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper in the vicinity of the
WTC towers that also collapsed on September 11, 2001. Eyewitnesses
have repeatedly reported explosions happening before the collapse of
both of the towers, while experts consider these theories to be
unreasonable.
 9/11 truth figures Steven E. Jones and Mike Berger have further added
that the death of Osama bin Laden did not change their questions about
the attacks, nor provide closure.
 According to writer Jeremy Stahl, since Bush left office, the overall
number of believers in 9/11 conspiracy theories has dipped, while the
number of people who believe in the most "radical" theories has held
fairly steady.
The most prominent conspiracy theories can be broadly divided into three
main forms:
 LIHOP ("Let it happen on purpose") – suggests that key individuals within
the government had at least some foreknowledge of the attacks and
deliberately ignored it or actively weakened United States' defenses to
ensure the hijacked flights were not intercepted. Similar allegations were
made about Pearl Harbor.
 MIHOP ("Make/Made it happen on purpose") – that key individuals within
the government planned the attacks and collaborated with, or framed, al-
Qaeda in carrying them out. There is a range of opinions about how this
might have been achieved.
 Others – who reject the accepted account of the September 11 attacks
are not proposing specific theories, but try to demonstrate that the U.S.
government's account of the events is wrong. This, according to them,
would lead to a general call for a new official investigation into the events
of September 11, 2001. According to Jonathan Kay, managing editor for
comment at the Canadian newspaper National Post and author of
the Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing
Conspiracist Underground, "They feel their job is to show everybody that
the official theory of 9/11 is wrong. And then, when everybody is
convinced, then the population will rise up and demand a new
investigation with government resources, and that investigation will tell us
what actually happened."