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https://www.globalresearch.ca/best-evidence-contradicting-official-position-911-excerpts-from-911-unmasked-international-review-panel-investigation/5781557

The “Best Evidence” Contradicting the Official Position on 9/11: Excerpts from 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation

“The 9/11 attacks ushered in a new age of propaganda about terrorism. Those events, and the resulting “war on terror,” profoundly increased the value of terrorism as a newsworthy topic. They also ensured that state security services together with vested defense interests remain the major voices shaping news coverage today.” -David Ray Griffin, March 14, 2022

Introduction

The 9/11 attacks of 2001 have had powerfully destructive global effects. Given these disastrous effects, and the many people who have raised questions about the attacks, one would suppose that the press would have thoroughly explored the question of how they were carried out and who organized them. But this did not happen. Rather, the press for the most part simply repeated the official account and attacked those who questioned it. But deep and pervasive contradictions in the official reports made questioning necessary.1

According to the official account, of course, the attacks were engineered by al-Qaeda under the inspiration of Osama bin Laden. As researchers outside the mainstream press began studying the evidence, they discovered more and more facts that seemed to conflict with the official account.

As a result, a movement evolved – which came to be called the “9/11 Truth Movement.” The main focus of this movement has been to investigate evidence that does not square with the official story. But some of this evidence has, beyond showing problems in the official account, also suggested that the attacks were organized by people within the U.S. government, specifically the Bush-Cheney administration and its Pentagon.

Under this interpretation, 9/11 was a “false-flag attack,” in which a government attacks itself while providing evidence implicating some other government or group, thereby providing a basis for attacking it. And there were certainly motives to organize attacks. For example, the neoconservatives, led by Dick Cheney, had in the 1990s expressed their desire to attack Iraq.2 Moreover, in 2001, at the first meeting of the Bush-Cheney administration’s National Security Council, the focus was on how (not whether) to eliminate Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein.3

However, although 9/11 scholars pointed to possible motives for a false flag attack, in addition to reasons why the official account of 9/11 cannot be true, the mainstream press dismissed these arguments as irrational, unsupported “conspiracy theories – and instead suggested personal shortcomings that make people susceptible to conspiracy theories. Rather than investigating the claims of the 9/11 research community, a writer of Accuracy in Media wrote: “What needs to be investigated is the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement, its members, and those abroad who continue to promote it.”4

The public debates about the credibility of the “9/11 Truth Movement’s” beliefs have been generally dismissive, and superficial at best. One of the main reasons for this has been the lack of any basis for saying what the movement’s beliefs are. Reporters take statements by various people claiming that “9/11 was an inside job” as summarizing “what 9/11 truthers believe.” Using that basis, they have often portrayed people who question 9/11 as ignorant and irrational.

This portrayal has blocked public access to solid investigative research into the defining political event of this century.

The two of us therefore decided to offer the media and the public a body of scientific information constituting “best evidence” that contradicts the official position about 9/11.

David Ray Griffin, Ph.D

Elizabeth Woodworth, BA, BLS

Co-founders, Consensus 911

***

Forming the 9/11 Consensus Panel

In 2011 Dr. David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth formed a panel of 20-some independent researchers well-versed on 9/11 and who possessed a broad spectrum of expertise.

23 people with varying professional backgrounds came together to apply disciplined analysis to the verifiable evidence about the 9/11 attacks. This panel includes people from the fields of physics, chemistry, structural engineering, aeronautical engineering, piloting, airplane crash investigation, medicine, journalism, psychology, and religion. Consensus 9/11 also has seven honorary members, including: Ferdinand Imposimato, the Honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court; the late biologist Lynn Margulis; and the late Hon. Michael Meacher, the longest-sitting member of the British House of Commons.

The Purpose and Goal

The panel members have approved the following statement of purpose and goal:

“THE PURPOSE OF THE 9/11 CONSENSUS PANEL IS TO PROVIDE THE WORLD WITH A CLEAR STATEMENT, BASED ON EXPERT INDEPENDENT OPINION, OF SOME OF THE BEST EVIDENCE OPPOSING THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE ABOUT 9/11.”

“THE GOAL OF THE CONSENSUS PANEL IS TO PROVIDE A READY SOURCE OF EVIDENCE-BASED RESEARCH TO ANY INVESTIGATION THAT MAY BE UNDERTAKEN BY THE PUBLIC, THE MEDIA, ACADEMIA, OR ANY OTHER INVESTIGATIVE BODY OR INSTITUTION.”

The Procedure

Applying a standard best-evidence consensus model used in science and medicine, the 9/11 Consensus Panel has examined a growing number of claims made in the official account of the 9/11 attacks.

This model carries so much authority in medicine that medical consensus statements derived from it are often reported in the news.

Similarly, the crime of 9/11 – which was never properly investigated by any official body – requires that an approach something like that employed in medicine be used for an open investigation. Consensus 9/11 has provided evidence against official claims in nine categories:

• The Destruction of the Twin Towers
• The Destruction of WTC 7
• The Attack on the Pentagon
• The 9/11 Flights
• US Military Exercises On and Before 9/11
• Claims about Military and Political Leaders
• Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers
• Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights
• Insider Trading

The Impact

Consensus 9/11 has already had an impact around the world: The 9/11 Consensus Points have been translated and posted to the Internet in English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish.

The 7-year project was published in the book, 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation, Olive Branch Press, 2018.

The 3,500-member organization, Architects and Engineers for 9/11Truth, wrote:

“9/11 UNMASKED IS DESTINED TO BE THE BIBLE, THE FOUNDATION, THE GO-TO SOURCE OF FUTURE RESEARCH. IT BELONGS ON THE BOOKSHELF OF ANYONE WHO HAS NAGGING QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. AND IT WILL SURELY BE ON THE DESK OF EACH AND EVERY GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL WHO MIGHT ONE DAY BE TASKED WITH REINVESTIGATING THAT MONUMENTAL EVENT.”

https://propgwot.org/9-11-crimes/

The “best evidence” is in nine parts:

Part 1: The Destruction of the Twin Towers

The task of developing a plausible explanation for the destruction of the Twin Towers was given to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST’s scientific explanations were to be provided by a team of scientists under lead investigator Shyam Sunder. NIST issued its Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers in 2005.5

This report has often been treated as if it were produced by an independent institution. However, NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce and, while writing its WTC report, it was an agency of the Bush administration. The name of Carlos Gutierrez, Bush’s secretary of commerce, was on the first page of NIST’s Final Report, and all of NIST’s directors were Bush appointees.6

Moreover, a former NIST employee, who had worked on the WTC project, reported in 2007 that NIST had been “fully hijacked from the scientific into the political realm.” As a result, scientists working for NIST “lost [their] scientific independence, and became little more than ‘hired guns.’” This whistleblower said:

“BY 2001, EVERYONE IN NIST LEADERSHIP HAD BEEN TRAINED TO PAY CLOSE HEED TO POLITICAL PRESSURES. THERE WAS NO CHANCE THAT NIST PEOPLE “INVESTIGATING” THE 9/11 SITUATION COULD HAVE BEEN ACTING IN THE TRUE SPIRIT OF SCIENTIFIC INDEPENDENCE. . . . EVERYTHING THAT CAME FROM THE HIRED GUNS WAS BY THEN ROUTINELY FILTERED THROUGH THE FRONT OFFICE, AND ASSESSED FOR POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS BEFORE RELEASE.” 7

Another NIST whistleblower spoke out in 2016. In the summer of 2016, Europhysics News,known as “the magazine of the European physics community,” had published an article entitled “15 Years Later: On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses.” Written by physicist Steven Jones and three other researchers, the article concluded: “[T]he evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition.”8

A letter to the editor by Peter Michael Ketcham, a former NIST mathematician, said that in August of 2016 he began looking at some of NIST’s reports on the World Trade Center and watching documentaries challenging its findings. In summarizing his response, he said:

“I QUICKLY BECAME FURIOUS. FIRST, I WAS FURIOUS WITH MYSELF. HOW COULD I HAVE WORKED AT NIST ALL THOSE YEARS AND NOT HAVE NOTICED THIS BEFORE? SECOND, I WAS FURIOUS WITH NIST. . . . THE MORE I INVESTIGATED, THE MORE APPARENT IT BECAME THAT NIST HAD REACHED A PREDETERMINED CONCLUSION BY IGNORING, DISMISSING, AND DENYING THE EVIDENCE.” 9

Part 2: The Destruction of WTC 7

World Trade Center 7 was a 47-story steel-framed building that was like the Twin Towers in two fundamental ways: First, all three buildings came down on 9/11, but WTC 7 did not come down until late afternoon. Second, the three buildings were, according to the official account, the first steel-framed buildings to have ever come down without explosives.

But the building collapses were also different. First, WTC 7, unlike the Twin Towers, was not hit by an airplane.

Second, the buildings were treated very differently by the government and the press. The airplane strikes on the Twin Towers and their subsequent collapses were shown by the television networks over and over again. But after 9/11 itself, the destruction of WTC 7 was seldom if ever shown on TV. Moreover, The 9/11 Commission Report, which appeared in 2004, did not even mention WTC 7.

A third difference between the buildings was their treatment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST announced in 2002 that it would issue reports on both the Twin Towers and WTC 7 in 2004. It did finally release its report on the Twin Towers in 2005, but its draft and final reports on WTC 7 were not released until 2008.10

The fact that WTC 7 was not struck by a plane left officials without any seemingly obvious reason for its destruction. In November 2001, New York Times reporter James Glanz wrote: “[W]ithin the structural engineering community, [WTC 7] is considered to be much more important to understand [than the Twin Towers],” because engineers had no answer to the question, “why did 7 come down?”11

NIST’s explanation of the destruction of WTC 7 is considered to be one of its weakest explanations by many people, including former NIST employee Peter Ketcham. Right after charging that “NIST had reached a predetermined conclusion by ignoring, dismissing, and denying the evidence,” Ketcham said:

“AMONG THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES IS THE EXPLANATION FOR THE COLLAPSE OF WTC 7 AS AN ELABORATE SEQUENCE OF UNLIKELY EVENTS CULMINATING IN THE ALMOST SYMMETRICAL TOTAL COLLAPSE OF A STEEL-FRAME BUILDING INTO ITS OWN FOOTPRINT AT FREE-FALL ACCELERATION.” 12

Part 3: The Attack on the Pentagon

Although the “9/11 attacks” include an attack on the Pentagon as well as on the World Trade Center, there has much less attention to the Pentagon. As with the WTC attacks, the first investigation of the Pentagon attack was supervised by FEMA. In 2003, it published The Pentagon Building Performance Report, written in 2002 by volunteers from the American Society of Civil Engineers. However, this preliminary report was not followed up by a more extensive report written by NIST or any other official organization. So the 2003 FEMA report on the Pentagon building remained the only official account of the attack on the Pentagon.

Among people who have seriously studied the evidence about the destruction of the World Trade Center, there is almost complete consensus. The same cannot be said about the attack on the Pentagon. In particular, the main issue for a lack of consensus is whether American Flight 77, or any other large airliner, struck the Pentagon.

Nevertheless, the majority of the Consensus Panel agreed on the central issue: that the official account of the Pentagon attack is not true.

The central problem involves the claim that the Pentagon was damaged from a surprise attack by an airplane piloted by an al-Qaeda hijacker, Hani Hanjour. Three kinds of evidence refute the official account: 1) Media evidence about Hanjour’s flying skills; 2) Media evidence about Hanjour’s alleged flight trajectory; and 3) Statements by commercial pilots.

This evidence suffices to bring the entire official claim about the Pentagon into question.

Three other Consensus Points provide evidence concerning official foreknowledge of the Pentagon attack, and why it was not prevented.

Part 4: The 9/11 Flights

Nothing is more central to the official account of the 9/11 attacks than the claim that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were struck by airplanes that had been hijacked by al-Qaeda operatives. Also, United Flight 93 was said to have crashed in Pennsylvania after some passengers stormed the hijackers who had taken over the plane.

However, there are at least four very good reasons to reject the claim that the 9/11 airliners were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists:

• Not one of the eight pilots performed the required action to “squawk” the universal hijack code (7500)
• Residents, the mayor, and journalists near Shanksville, PA, reported that no airliner was visible at the designated crash site,13 and that parts – including a thousand-pound engine piece – were found over a mile away.14
• No good evidence has been provided to support the official claims that hijackers manually deactivated or altered the operation of the transponders aboard the 9/11 flights.
• The claim that no information could be obtained from the black boxes of any of the four 9/11 planes cannot be substantiated.

The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

Part 5: The US Military Exercises On and Before 9/11

There were strange anomalies in the major military exercises held on and before September 11, 2001:

1. Critical to the success of the 9/11 attacks was the element of surprise, according to key White House and Pentagon officials. However, contrary to claims made in The 9/11 Commission Report, US military exercises prior to 9/11 involved hijackings in which planes were used as weapons, both within as well as outside US airspace.
2. Until September 11, 2001, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted four major annual war exercises, which included simulated war situations. Although these exercises were traditionally held in October or November, they were all running on September 11, 2001.

Global Guardian, a massive annual Command Post-Exercise and Field Training Exercise, is traditionally held in October or November each year. According to a military newspaper dated March 23, 2001,15 the overarching Global Guardian exercise had been originally scheduled for October, but was subsequently moved to early September. 16

Part 6: Contradicted Claims about Key Military and Political Leaders

The official accounts of the activities of eight political and military leaders with central roles on 9/11 – roles that put them in position to affect the outcome of crucial events of that day – are challenged by facts suggesting that each story is false or at best dubious.

President George W. Bush: On the morning of 9/11, President Bush was visiting a grade school in Sarasota, Florida. When it appeared that hijackers were going after high-value targets, the head of the Secret Service detail allowed President Bush to remain at the school for 30 minutes and to make a television address to the nation, thereby letting any terrorists know that the President was still there.

The Secret Service is charged with protecting the President. One of the unanswered questions, wrote the St. Petersburg Times, is “why the Secret Service did not immediately hustle Bush to a secure location.” The 9/11 Family Steering Committee asked: “Why was President Bush permitted by the Secret Service to remain in the Sarasota elementary school?”

The 9/11 Commission Report merely said, “The Secret Service told us they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door.”

This break in protocol suggests – even if it does not prove – that the Secret Service, at some level, knew that the President was not in danger.

Vice President Dick Cheney: According to the 9/11 Commission, Vice President Dick Cheney did not enter the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center), where he took charge of the government’s response to the attacks, until “shortly before 10:00,” hence after the Pentagon attack.

However, a number of witnesses – including Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, White House photographer David Bohrer, and Cheney himself (on Meet the Press) – reported that Cheney was in the PEOC before the Pentagon attack. Most important was Mineta, who reported that Cheney had given responses to questions from a young officer, as a plane approached the Pentagon, about whether the “orders still stand.” Cheney’s reply that they did stand can best be understood as Cheney’s confirmation of a stand-down order.

Another dispute about Cheney involves the time that he gave the military permission – allegedly authorized by President Bush – to shoot down any hostile passenger airplanes. This concerns United 93, which allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania. Although there were many reports that the flight was shot down by the U.S. military, the military and the 9/11 Commission maintained that Cheney’s shoot-down authorization was not given until after United 93 had already crashed.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and The 9/11 Commission Report, Rumsfeld was in his office and oblivious to the attacks until he felt the attack on the Pentagon. Also, he did not know about the hijacking of United 93 until after it had crashed.

However, counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies, which appeared in 2004 several months before the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report, portrayed Rumsfeld as being in the Pentagon’s video center in the Executive Support Center from shortly after the second WTC attack until after the attack on the Pentagon. Also, Robert Andrews, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, stated independently that, after the second WTC attack, Rumsfeld went across the hall to the Executive Support Center to join Clarke’s video conference.

General Richard Myers, Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: According to The 9/11 Commission Report and General Richard Myers, the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Myers was on Capitol Hill during the attacks, not returning to the Pentagon until after it had been attacked. This account is contradicted by several witnesses:

• Richard Clarke’s 2004 book Against All Enemies, portrayed Myers as having, along with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, gone to the Pentagon’s video center at roughly 9:10 AM – shortly after the second (9:03) attack on the World Trade Center – meaning that Myers could not have been on Capitol Hill at that time.
• Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army, indicated that Myers was in a breakfast meeting with Rumsfeld from 8:00 until 8:46 AM (when the first plane hit the WTC).
• The 2009 book by General Hugh Shelton, for whom Myers was substituting that morning, portrayed Myers as being in the Pentagon when it was hit.

General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff: On the morning of 9/11, General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later reported that he was on a plane – the Speckled Trout – to Europe.

After learning of the second WTC attack, he ordered his flight crew to return to the Pentagon. According to Shelton, he was almost immediately given permission to return to the USA, returned to Andrews Air Force Base by roughly noon, and reached the Pentagon shortly thereafter.

However, this claim is contradicted by several facts:

• The Speckled Trout flight navigator reportedly said that the plane, having not quickly received clearance, had to go into a holding pattern over Greenland (for two hours) and again over Canada.
• The flight tracking strip indicated that the Speckled Trout did not land at Andrews until 4:40 PM.
• A military assistant traveling with Shelton stated that they drove from Andrews to the Pentagon in the “late afternoon.”
• General Myers stated that Shelton had arrived at the Pentagon at 5:40 PM, having “just returned from an aborted European flight.”

Brigadier General Montague Winfield: For two years it was both assumed and reported on television that Army Brig. Gen. Montague Winfield, the Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) at the National Military Command Center (NMCC), was in charge the morning of 9/11.

But in July 2003, the 9/11 Commission was told that between 8:30 AM and roughly 10:00 AM, Winfield had been replaced – at his own request, to attend a meeting – by Navy Captain Charles Joseph “Joe” Leidig, who two months earlier had been made the Deputy for Command Center Operations, and in August had qualified to stand watch in Winfield’s place.

However, this account raises these puzzling questions:

• Why did Brig. Gen. Winfield present himself, in CNN and ABC programs in 2002, as the DDO during the attacks?
• Why was Brig. General Winfield not called back to the NMCC after the second attack on the Twin Towers (which made clear that America was being attacked)?
• Why did General Richard Myers, who had been the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, describe Winfield – in a memoir published in 2009 – as the “duty officer in charge” of the NMCC on the morning of 9/11?

These unanswered questions suggest the untruth of the claim of the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission that Leidig, rather than Winfield, served as the DDO during the 9/11 attacks.

General Ralph Eberhart, the Commander-in-Chief of NORAD: Being ultimately responsible for the defense of America on 9/11, Eberhart was a complete failure: His interceptor pilots did not prevent any of the attacks; he made himself incommunicado from 9:30 to 10:15; he made several implausible and contradictory statements about his activities; and he caused delays in responding, partly because of all the military exercises he had scheduled for that day. Rather than being called a “9/11 hero,” considerable evidence points to Eberhart as having been derelict in his duty.

NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani: After the attacks on the Twin Towers, NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his Emergency Management team set up temporary headquarters in a building at 75 Barclay Street. While there, he told Peter Jennings of ABC News that he had been warned “that the World Trade Center was going to collapse.” But while testifying to the 9/11 Commission in 2004, he did not mention this warning. He instead claimed that he had became afraid that the Barclay Street building might collapse. In 2007, a group of people with a video camera asked Giuliani why the people in the Towers had not been warned. Giuliani replied, “I didn’t know the towers were going to collapse. . . . No one that I know of had any idea they would implode. That was a complete surprise.”

Conclusion

• All eight officials were in position to affect the outcome of the 9/11 attacks.
• The 9/11 Commission’s account of each man’s activities is contradicted by considerable evidence.

Part 7: Osama bin Laden and the Hijackers

At the heart of the official account of 9/11 was the claim that the attacks were conceived by Osama bin Laden, and were carried out by 19 members of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization. These 19 men were all said to be, like Bin Laden himself, devout Muslims, with Mohamed Atta, the “ringleader” of the group, described as having become extremely religious. However, evidence shows that the claim about Osama bin Laden was unsupported and that the claims about the alleged hijackers were untrue:

• The FBI did not list 9/11 as one of the terrorist acts for which bin Laden was wanted;
• The claim that Mohamed Atta went to Portland, Maine, on September 10 and 11 has raised compelling reasons to doubt it;
• The claim that a Dulles airport video showed five hijackers was negated by its unstamped images, and too fast a speed for a security video;
• The claim that the Mohamed Atta and the hijackers were devout Muslims was negated by media reports of their use of alcohol, cocaine, and strip clubs;
• The claim that Atta arrived in the US in June 2000 is negated by Able Danger evidence that he arrived in Jan-Feb. 2000.

Part 8: The Phone Calls from the 9/11 Flights

The claim that there were phone calls from passengers and crew from the 9/11 flights was essential to the official account of 9/11. According to this account:

• Officials first learned of the hijacking of one of the flights from phone calls from Barbara Olson to her husband Ted Olson, then solicitor general of the United States.17
• Phone calls from the planes were the source of information about how the hijackings occurred and what was going on inside the planes.18
• For example, one of Barbara Olson’s calls was the only source of the report that the alleged hijackers had box cutters.19

According to the early press stories, some of the calls were made from onboard phones, and about 15 of them were made from cell phones.20 However, studies showed that most of the reported cell phone calls would have been impossible, and by 2006, the FBI declared that only two of the calls were indeed from cell phones.21

Part 9: The Question of Insider Trading

A week after 9/11 the BBC stated:

“THE CITY WATCHDOG, THE FINANCIAL SERVICES AUTHORITY, HAS LAUNCHED AN INQUIRY INTO UNUSUAL SHARE PRICE MOVEMENTS IN LONDON BEFORE LAST WEEK’S ATROCITIES. THE [LONDON] TIMES REPORTS THAT THE AMERICAN AUTHORITIES ARE INVESTIGATING UNUSUALLY LARGE SALES OF SHARES IN AIRLINES AND INSURANCE COMPANIES. THERE ARE SAID TO BE SUSPICIONS THAT THE SHARES WERE SOLD BY PEOPLE WHO KNEW ABOUT THE IMPENDING ATTACKS.” 22

Three econometric studies published in reputable financial journals have reported unusual trades substantiating these suspicions, and have not been challenged by professional or government responses.

Conclusion

There has been much discussion about “fake news”. Some of the claims about false news are themselves false; others are true. The most fateful example of fake news in the twenty-first century thus far (2018) has been the official account of 9/11.

For years “we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world. It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation.” 23

It is long past the time to set the story straight.