by Leo Brodie,
updated December, 2005

In late 2004, I was surprised to learn that there are many people who are questioning the official story of what happened on 9/11. According a Zogby poll, half of New Yorkers believe that U.S. leaders had foreknowledge of impending 9/11 attacks and "consciously failed" to act. Looking into it, I was amazed that the problems with the official story are not based on theory or conjecture, but rather on open discrepencies between various public accounts, many serious discrepencies between the accounts of people actually involved.

If your mind is already made up that the government-appointed 9/11 Commission told the truth, I won't try to convince you otherwise. But if you follow the links in my page, you'll find that the Commission Report and publicly documented facts don't add up.

You may have heard some theories, like "it was a missile, not a plane, that hit the Pentagon". Those are just theories, and some of them are absurd. Don't let the easy dismissal of these straw men cause you to dismiss the whole story. Stick with what is in the 9/11 Commission report itself, and compare that against previous public records and news accounts.

Everyone has a right to their own political opinions. I do not wish to offend anyone for having a different opinion. The point of this article is simply to make people aware that there are serious discrepencies within the official story of 9/11, and to invite people to look into it for themselves. I wish someone had told me earlier.

If you're like me back in October, 2004, just a few months ago as I write this, you believe that the horrifying events of September 11, 2001 were the result of a successful conspiracy perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, and that any questions about that day were finally put to rest by the 9/11 Commission report.

If you're like me, you probably remember that several FBI whistle blowers, like Coleen Rowley, complained that their investigations into the alleged attackers prior to 9/11 were ignored and seemingly thwarted, but you assumed it was a case of bureaucratic bungling and failing to connect the dots.

If you're like me, you probably remember that shortly after the attacks, in dramatic contrast, the FBI identified all the hijackers, tracing them to Al Quaeda, finding passports and flight instruction manuals oddly left behind in rental cars and hotel rooms. They even found a passport of one of the terrorists near the rubble of the World Trade Center, despite most of the plane being pulverized to sub-micron dust, and not even the black boxes being found, according to the FBI. Still reeling from the horror of the attack, you were grateful for the string of lucky breaks, and gratified that the President was determined to go after the terrorists.

If you're like me, you also remember at the time reports that several of the alleged hijackers on the FBI list claimed to still be alive. You assumed it didn't matter. The terrorists probably falsified their identities.

If you're like me, you were distracted by the contention that the White House had been given documents warning of possible attacks by Osama bin Laden. If you're like me, you believed that even if there were warnings, no one would have expected such an attack on that particular day, so how could anyone have prevented it? You may have even read that several foreign intelligence agencies and governments, including Vladimir Putin himself, claimed to have warned us in advance of the attacks, but assumed they were just piling on.

If you're like me, you may have remembered that for years, up through the final report by the 9/11 Commission, the FAA and NORAD revised their timelines to explain, initially, why no jets were scrambled to intercept the attacking planes, and later, why the jets were scrambled too late. You may have noticed that no one was ever reprimanded for this oversight; in fact, the military commanders involved were promoted. Hearing the frightening reconstructions of the day, like me, you accepted the obvious implication: that the necessary communication channels had never been set up for this kind of emergency.

Before, you had always assumed that the military had well-honed procedures for such events. You reconciled the tragic failures that came to light by dismissing your preconceptions and ignoring your common sense. Nor did the mainstream press point out that not only were such procedures well-established, but that prior to the attacks, they were activated and jets were actually scrambled to intercept wayward aircraft on average a hundred times a year.

If you're like me, it struck you a bit odd that the Twin Towers collapsed the way they did. You may have heard the experts on television explain that the heat from the intense fire must have melted the steel framework and caused the floors to collapse, triggering a "pancake effect" with each floor crashing down onto the floor below.

In your grieving the thousands of lives lost in those collapses, you may not have noticed that the towers fell straight down into their own footprints, suddenly, at the speed of gravity, in the manner of a controlled demolition, and not by collapsing on the side where the fires were and toppling to one side. In your fear and rage watching the video, you may not have noticed the enormous clouds of dust shooting upwards and outwards in all directions just as the buildings began to fall. You may not have connected the reports from the fire crews in the building that the fires seem contained, not the raging inferno that was reputed to have melted the steel framework. You probably didn't realize that the World Trade Center towers had actually been designed to withstand an accidental crash of a commercial airliner loaded with fuel. You didn't know that if the pancake theory were true, it would have left the central steel supports still standing, instead of a pile of dust and rubble. While you knew that both towers collapsed within an hour of being struck, you probably did not realize that the second building to be struck was the first to fall. Nor did you notice that the second plane struck at the corner of the building, causing most of the fuel to penetrate the other side and explode in a huge fireball, widely captured on film, leaving little fuel to burn inside the building. You may not have realized that all the remaining steel was removed as scrap, and was melted before any structural analysis could be performed. Or that the removal of this evidence made fire inspectors furious because if skyscrapers can collapse because of short-burning low temperature fires, then all office buildings are at risk.

If you're like me, in your shock, you didn't particularly realize that a third building at the site, Building 7, also collapsed that same day, without having been struck at all. And if you watched a PBS special a year later, it may not have seemed odd that the landlord of the buildings mentioned that Building 7 was "pulled", the term demolition crews use for controlled demolition. Apparently it didn't strike the filmmakers as odd either, since they broadcast the statement unquestioned.

If you're like me, you watched in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 the scene in which President Bush sits in a classroom listening to children read, after being notified that the country is under attack and while victims are leaping to their death from the towers. If you're like me, you thought, "What a strange man." You might have even appreciated Moore's comic touch in imagining Bush thinking about the Saudis. You saw that movie years after hearing Vice President Dick Cheney imply on television that only the President could authorize shooting down hijacked planes. So it didn't occur to you that the President was not only being strange but seriously derelict in his duties. Not to mention the Secret Service for not prompting him. And when you heard Dick Cheney's statement, you had no way of knowing it simply wasn't true. And if you're like me, watching the President in the classroom, you didn't connect that with the Vice President's story about being whisked by the Secret Service to a protected bunker. If the Secret Service suspected that more planes would attack, why didn't they rush the President away from his photo opportunity for a whole hour?

If you're like me, you noticed these individual oddities, but you never thought to lay them all out side by side.

If you're like me, you didn't bother to read Richard A. Clarke's book "Against All Enemies" even though it supported your liberal position that the administration didn't do enough to prevent terrorism, which was all the rage in the press at the time. And even if you had read it, you probably wouldn't have noticed that it thoroughly contradicts Donald Rumsfeld's and Dick Cheney's accounts of where they were and what they were doing during the attacks. And nothing in the newspaper pointed out this discrepancy either.

If you're like me, you didn't bother to read the final 9/11 Commission Report, even though it confirms your liberal position that there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq, and even though it documents perhaps the most significant turning point in the history of our country. So you wouldn't have noticed that it mentions briefly a war exercise that coincidentally was being played that very morning. And since you didn't read Richard A. Clarke's book either, you wouldn't have noticed that he mentions yet another war game, also being coincidentally played that same morning, with a different military objective.

And since the mainstream media never pursued those clues, you wouldn't have known that there were at least five separate drills conducted that very morning in the military and intelligence services that coincidentally conspired to further confuse the situation and disable our national defense system.

If you're like me, you may have read somewhere that the alleged hijacker who flew the plane into the Pentagon could not graduate from flight school. But you didn't connect that with the fact that the plane followed a bizarre high-speed spiral dive, turning 330 degrees at 530 MPH in order to strike the only part of the Pentagon currently being renovated, causing the least possible damage to the occupants. You were relieved that none of the senior military leadership were injured or killed. You probably didn't know that military pilots who analyzed the flight claim that such precision and speed could be accomplished only by computer control. You may recall hearing that the flight recorders were allegedly unable to produce any information, but you didn't realize how unusual that was.

But, if you're like me, you have realized that this country has changed since 9/11. The Patriot Act, which undermines certain rights given by the first and fourth amendments, was signed without protest. You probably did not realize that this 100-plus page document was delivered to the legislature just 13 days after the attacks, suggesting it must have been written ahead of time.

You certainly followed news of the U.S. successfully invading Afghanistan and routing out the Taliban, although you probably weren't aware at the time that the U.S. had just recently given up on negotiations with them for supporting a pipeline to deliver oil from the Caspian Basin.

Then the U.S. invaded Iraq, based on claims of a connection to Al Quaeda and alleged build-up of WMDs, both claims which has since been proven false but seemed credible to many, given our fears of 9/11. You knew at the time those claims were bogus, and moreover, you knew that they knew their claims were bogus. But you could never put your finger on why they were beating the drums of war. If you're like me, you complained that the administration had no exit strategy, but you assumed that was just bad planning.

Now the U.S. has declared that pre-emptive strikes are a key component of our national security strategy. Pre-emptive strikes on any country we deem hostile, absent an immediate threat, and based solely on our own intelligence reports. This would have been unthinkable seven years ago, but in our post-9/11 world, the unthinkable is reality. Torture is now a regretted but necessarily evil.

If you're like me, you probably were aware that oil was somehow an incentive. But you probably weren't aware that people in the administration, including Dick Cheney, believe that the world is reaching Peak Oil production, and they know that 60% of the world's remaining supply sits in a tiny region within the borders of Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

If you're like me, you may be willing to admit that the neo-conservatives might be desperate to maintain the American way of life and control the last remaining oil supplies. Desperate enough to sacrifice the lives of thousands of our brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you could never imagine them to be so desperate as to sacrifice thousands of ... no, it couldn't be.

If you're like me just a few months ago, you would not have been able to imagine such a thing.

For more information and thorough sourcing of everything I describe above, I encourage you to study any of the following resources:

Web sites

Complete 911 Timeline
Paul Thompson's "Complete 9/11 Timeline" is part of the Cooperative Research timeline project, whose objective is collaborative documentation of the public historical record using an open-content model. This resource exclusively collates publicly available records, avoiding speculation entirely. Paul's timeline was published in paperback form as "The Terror Timeline" in September 2004.
Says Thompson:
I don't know exactly what happened on 9/11. I have my theories and hunches, but it's an extremely complicated plot, and there are a number of plausible explanations for part or all of the story's aspects. Also, I don't want to force my ideas down your throat. I'm using the timeline to draw attention to interesting stories that you may not have read. I have tried to let the stories speak for themselves, and reduce my voice as much as possible. I hope you come to your own conclusions.

9/11 Commission: The official cover-up guide
This document, in PDF form, is a good summary of the flaws and conflicts of interest in the 9/11 Commission report.

http://www.911truth.org
A good starting point.

The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11

http://fromthewilderness.com
The site is largely the work of Mike Ruppert, who was an LAPD narcotics investigator when he discovered CIA drug trafficking in 1977. He subsequently worked to expose the fraudulent war on drugs, and has done a great deal of work on documenting the role of government agencies in the September 11th attack.

9-11 Visibility Project
An action-oriented, rather than research or analysis site, dedicated to supporting the 9-11 truth movement itself, led by the victims' families' efforts to obtain full government accountability

http://911research.wtc7.net/talks/towers/index.html
Evidence of "The Twin Towers' Demolition," a presentation by Jim Hoffman with videos and animated frames.

http://911research.wtc7.net/resources/web/foreknowlege.html
Summary of other sites (source of some of my descriptions here)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6590.htm
Video of Mike Springman – US consulate and foreign service official. Springman went public (after internal efforts failed) to expose the State Dept-CIA allowing terrorists into the US

http://www.911research.com/index.html
9-11 Research focuses on the facts of the attack and analysis of the official explanation. For a broader view that includes historical context, and disinformation used to conceal the truth, visit our companion site, 911review.com."

Simplifying the case against Dick Cheney
Summarizes the major points made within the book Crossing the Rubicon (see below) that identify the prime suspect in the crimes of 9/11.

http://www.oilempire.us
Not a pretty site, but a good starting point because its author attempts to distinguish credible information from disinformation. This extensive site connects the dots of the 9/11/01 attack and related issues such as peak oil. It emphasizes the logic of the attack -- such as the most sparsely occupied block Pentagon being hit -- over detailed speculations as to how the attack was engineered. Its strengths include the air defense failures of 9/11/01, the historical precedents to the attack, and geopolitical motives such as resource exploitation in Central Asia. The site makes a compelling case that the attack was America's Reichstag Fire, based on the vanishing probability that all of the peculiar features of the attack could have co-occurred without being coordinated by people inside the government. If you decide to pursue the dozens of Web sites now devoted to this topic, I recommend you keep a link to this page handy.

http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html
Speaking of disinformation, Popular Mechanics recently attempted to discredit the 9/11 Truth Movement and the "World Trade Center conspiracy" by ignoring the most significant evidence and instead citing disinformation such as the "pod theory", which the article then debunks. This review by Jim Hoffman is an articulate rebuttal to the Popular Mechanics article.

Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?
This paper, by Professor Steven E. Jones of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University, calls for a serious investigation into the collapse of WTC 7 and the Twin Towers, and presents evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis. See also Physics Professor Concludes Bombs, Not Planes, Toppled WTC

Books

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
I can't recommend this book strongly enough. It lays out the history and background of all the players involved -- going back to the Iran Contra scandal, a detailed analysis of the Peak Oil phenomenon, and the physical evidence surrounding the attacks themselves. It makes a powerful case that the neo-cons had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to perpetrate this crime. This book cites careful research and publicly available documents, news reports and testimony.

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11
David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 -- stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves -- and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day.

The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions David Ray Griffin
Conclusive refutation of the official story and proof of the cover-up, with who conducted the investigation and their ties to oil and the Administration. Somewhat dry, very analytical reading, but the perfect antitode to any notion that the Commission Report settles the matter.

The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute
by Paul Thompson. The web-based timeline (see above) in book form.