A 9/11 Truth-Seeker Responds to a Skeptic

From an email from Alex James quoted on this thread on the Signs of the Times forum:

The Skeptic's questions to the 9/11 Truth Seeker are in "quotes"

"It is like a religious cult for you"

I find that hilarious. Did you know that the latest nationwide Zogby poll, conducted on May 22nd, shows that 42% of adults in America believe that the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks, saying there has been a cover-up? This amounts to 70 million people! Sir, please...can you, with a serious face, call 70 million people a "cult"? And the tens of million Europeans who believe there's a cover-up? All "cultists", too?

"You keep talking about your people visiting Mahathir and Chavez. Don't you think that it is a little odd that the foreign leaders that are signing on to the 9/11 conspiracy theory bandwagon are all America haters?"

Wrong. Mahathir and Chavez are just two of scores of members of foreign governments who have been exposed to the FACTS about 9/11. Members of parliament in Germany, Sweden, UK, France, Belgium, Denmark, and Holland are some of the EUROPEANS who have watched the various 9/11 movies and expressed VERY serious concerns about the US government's "official" story. I'm sure it will shock you to know that The Hon. Andreas Von Bulow, the former German Minister of Defense, is a member of Scholars For 9/11 Truth. Von Bulow, a 25-year parliamentarian and member of Helmut Schmidt's cabinet, was also head of the German secret service at one time. He states unequivocally that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the command center for the operation was Mayor Giuliani's fortified bunker in Building 7, which is one of the reasons why that structure had to be demolished. [The other reason, of course, was to ensure the destruction of mountains of evidence contained in NSA, CIA, DEA, and ATF files relating to corporate fraud, money laundering, and drug trafficking. What's not commonly known is that all of these agencies, among others, were all occupants of Building 7.]

The 9/11 panel that toured various American and European cities was organized, funded, and led by millionaire philanthropist Jimmy Walter - who, by the way, has invested over $6M of his personal funds in the movement. Walter also produced the excellent DVD, "Confronting The Evidence", over 600,000 copies of which have been distributed FREE worldwide. Of course, the 9/11 Truth movement has since grown into a spectrum of independent organizations.

If it would make you feel any better, Walter's group moved on to South America and Asia only once they had completed their tour Europe. Insofar as the "cultists" to whom you refer, some of the noteworthy individuals in the greater 9/11 Truth movement (including those on various panels at international symposia) include:

* Former Chief Economist under George W. Bush, and professor at Texas A&M, Morgan Reynolds

* Former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force, under President Reagan, and combat fighter pilot Col. Robert Bowman (Caltech Phd in aeronautics and nuclear engineering)

* Former CIA Intelligence Advisor to Reagan and George HW Bush and founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Ray McGovern

* Former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Research Fellow at Stanford's Independent Institute, and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts

* Former Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces, and chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union 's ministry of Defense, General Leonid Ivashov

* Former MI6 British Counter Intelligence Officer, David Shayler

* Historian, international terrorism expert, and author, Webster G. Tarpley

* Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, former Marine Corps officer, author or editor of more than 20 books, and co-chair of Scholars For 9/11 Truth, James Fetzer

* Professor of Physics, Brigham Young University, and co-chair of Scholars For 9/11 Truth, Steven Jones

* Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion & Theology, Claremont Graduate University, and author or editor of some 30 books, including "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions" David Ray Griffin

* Professor of mathematics, University of Western Ontario, and founder of the Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven (SPINE), A.K Dewdney

* Aircraft crash investigation authority, USAF Col. (Ret) George Nelson

* Former chief Pentagon arms negotiator for the Middle East, USAF Col. (Ret) Don de Grand-Pre

* Numerous research scientists and academics from major universities around the world, hundreds of experts with PhDs, current and retired airline and military pilots...

If you would deem the above-mentioned individuals to be "cultists", then I shall unreservedly declare my pride of membership in their cult.

Sir, the reason the 9/11 movement is sweeping around the world is not to round up "enemies of America". The movement is spreading abroad because HUNDREDS of petitions to the US Congress have been IGNORED. If we cannot get the attention we demand in this country, we fully intend to hoist our case on to the international stage. After all, polls show that over SEVENTY PERCENT of Europeans believe 9/11 was an inside job.

"How do you get your cultists to believe that when five years after the fact the Oil in Iraq still belongs to Iraq?"

The illegal invasion of Iraq was about the oil, but not for the oil. We didn't go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite.

We went in to control Iraq's oil and make sure we didn't get it. Note that the price of oil went for $15 to $75 quintupling the $ purchase requirements, i.e. from over $600 million daily to over $3 billion daily.

To get the whole picture, you need to go back to 1920, when the major oil companies sat in a hotel room in Brussels and drew a red line around Iraq and said, "There'll be no oil coming out of that nation." Why? If they don't suppress oil coming out of Iraq, the price of oil will collapse. Saddam was a serious thorn in their side because he refused to play ball.

There is a 323-page plan, written by Big Oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq's oil. It was written out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It's all about a plan to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system which "enhances its relationship with OPEC."

In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of the US$ as a world currency that is printed because OPEC demands US$ for its oil which it promptly recycles back to the Federal Reserve thus allowing the US military-industrial feudal complex to get something for nothing. And this is one of the reasons "we" absolutely hate Hugo Chavez - and why Venezuela could well end up being the next nation (after Iran) on the Neocon's list to be accused of possessing hidden caches of "WMD".

As you'll see in the recent issue of Harper's, Chavez has asked OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which is also in Harper's, say, yes, Chavez has got more oil than Saudi Arabia.

We're paying $3 a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting $3 a gallon. When Bush came into power, oil cost $15-$18 a barrel. Bush has successfully built up the price of oil to over $70. That's the "mission accomplished" he announced. He didn't make a mistake here. That was the "mission accomplished" in Iraq.

ExxonMobil, after Enron, is the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns. The value of its reserves, because of the Bush wars and Bush actions, has gone up by almost $1 trillion in value. Just one company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company!

Harper's actually got their hands on two different plans for Iraq's oil, a 101-page plan and a 323-page plan, which is all about, in great detail, what we are going do with Iraq's oil. And guess what? The number of Iraqis involved in writing this crucial document is exactly ZERO. So much for bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqis.

It is now generally known what occurred in the secret discussions between the oil companies, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. The verdict is about to come down. Why was Cheney in the meeting with oil companies, looking over the maps of Iraq? He was on this committee drafting up the program for what to do about Iraq. And for their plan to work, they absolutely had to get rid of Saddam because he was totally destabilizing the oil markets by jerking prices to low levels.

Sir, wake up! As numerous administration whistleblowers have revealed, the plan for the invasion of Iraq was on the drawing boards LONG before 9/11. 9/11 was the trigger event to set that plan in motion by rallying the necessary support of the American populace.

Do you see all those flag-festooned Hummers and pickups on the streets piloted by seething armchair-Rambo-like lunatics? This could never have happened if the nation didn't suffer another "Pearl Harbor" -- aka Nine-Eleven. The Neocons used 9/11 to terrify the American public, galvanize combative emotions, and win their support for the invasions of two sovereign nations.

You know what's a real tragedy? A full one-third of the US population actually believes that Iraq was behind 9/11 and that Bush found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Clearly, a large percentage of us believes Iran has nuclear weapons and that America is in danger of being attacked by Iran.

No democracy can work when people take their responsibility as citizen so lightly as to be so totally and utterly ignorant.

"Claiming that the President is responsible for the mass murders is ludicrous"

I've repeated this to you before, but you continue to ignore it: 9/11 is beyond Republicans. It is beyond Democrats. It is beyond "politics" as we know it. It rises FAR higher. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be shocked if even Bush didn't know about all the details in advance. However, it is a fact the man has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, and someone's got to pay for that. That said, I refuse to get drawn into a "political" debate on 9/11, because that would be a simplistic and ignorant approach to understanding the forces behind this diabolically treasonous event.

"I wonder if you were 'converted' to your way of thinking about 9/11"

Absolutely -- but not in the way you insinuate it, i.e., naively joining some rah-rah crusade of conspiracy crackpots. As a matter of fact, I did not give the subject a second thought until October 2004, when I was directed me to a website that showed a brief clip re the attack on the Pentagon (http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/). As a pilot and aeronautical engineer, I was quite shocked by the claims, and initially thought it was nonsense. I actually set about fully expecting to DISPROVE what these "conspiracy nuts" were claiming. So I put on my engineer/pilot's cap and started to dig. The more I dug, the more foul-smelling things began to get. And then someone directed me to a website (http://911research.com/talks/b7/videos.html ) on the mysterious collapse of WTC Building 7, a building that was not struck by an aircraft, yet fell like a pillar of sand in 6.5 seconds into its own footprint. As I watched the video in utter disbelief, the whole "official conspiracy theory" began to fall apart right before my eyes.

"Are you one of the originators of the theory?"

Sir, you give me far too much credit. Minds far brighter than mine saw through this farce the moment it occurred. I'm a real "late bloomer". The closed-minded fool I was, it took me three years after 9/11 to catch on. I, like everyone else, believed what I was told. I vividly recall the day someone asked me whether I knew about the "9/11 cover-up". I truly thought what the chap meant was some financial scandal concerning compensation to widows or some such! No, I'm by no means one of the "originators" of the "theory". I am simply one little blade of grass in a huge, expansive, ever-growing meadow...there are literally TENS OF MILLIONS of people out there demanding that the 9/11 investigation be re-opened.

"Suppose, for example, we would rebuild WTC 1, and demolish it with explosives just to study how it would fall"

Sir, if an engineer or physicist needs to determine how long it would take for an apple to fall a certain distance from a tree, he doesn't need to grow an apple tree and wait for it to bear fruit in order to figure it out.

Employing very simple mathematical formulae based upon the law of gravity and the principles of aerodynamics, s/he can determine the time, to within 1/1000th of a second, on a blank sheet of paper. You either don't understand the most rudimentary explanation I presented you in my earlier email, or you refuse to do so because you know it will open up a can of worms that you'd much rather avoid altogether.

Let me repeat: It is IMPOSSIBLE (there is no other word) for the roofs of the towers to have struck the ground in exactly the same time as a ball dropped from the same height. Why? The roof would have to crush, tear and plow through 110 levels of steel columns, walls, floor slabs, office equipment, etc. before it could reach the ground. The ball would simply drop through AIR.

How could the roof and the ball both hit the ground in exactly the same time? The ONLY way the roof could have hit the ground in 9.4 seconds would have been if nothing existed beneath it but AIR. And that's what explosives do: blow everything out of the way so that there is nothing to resist the fall.

Forget the math. Look again at that photo I sent you, very carefully. Or, watch the video again - this time with a stopwatch in your hand. The explosives were triggered in a precise vertical sequence so that the floors and supports were getting blown out of the way just as the mass above them was falling. All you have to do is LOOK. And think.

"You say that you know how fast a building built like the towers should fall. I say there is no way you can know that because there has never been a building, built like that, fall before"

Yes, of course there is a way to know. Determining the LONGEST time it would take for a building to fall under these circumstances could be quite complex given the myriad variables, but calculating the FASTEST POSSIBLE time if nothing impeded its fall is a piece of cake.

You see, when it comes to "freefall", apples and buildings fall the same way. They both obey the same LAW -- the Law of Gravity. Every falling object is ruled by this fundamental law. Bricks and feathers fall at the same rate in a vacuum (one of the first thing a kid learns in science class, remember?).

A scientist does not have to grow a tree or reconstruct a building to arrive at a determination of FREEFALL time. He calculates it, like he does everything else. For instance, how does an engineer design a parachute? Does he strap a piece of cloth onto some hapless twit and toss him out of an airplane? Of course not. He calculates the forces involved on paper before cutting and sewing an appropriately DESIGNED piece of fabric. Entire airplanes are designed on paper before they ever leave the ground. ANY engineer worth his salt knows the MAXIMUM speed at which a building can fall: It is the same as that for an apple - except, unlike a building, the falling apple is not resisted by any structure beneath it. Therefore, it should, and will, fall a lot faster than a building - unless the bottom of the building was being "blown out" as it fell!

This isn't magic we're talking about, it's simple science. No, we certainly do not need to re-construct the towers to figure this one out.

"A ten-year-old child can see the difference when shown the videos"

I don't know about the kids in your neck of the woods, but when he was 13 (two years ago), my son figured it out all by himself. (I'm sure being a straight-A student in an all-Honors curriculum -- and a chess champion to boot -- helped, but that's beside the point).

Now, here's a challenge that might interest you: the aforementioned philanthropist, Jimmy Walter, announced THREE YEARS AGO that he will pay $1 million to the first person to prove, through a detailed mathematical analysis, that explosives were NOT used to destroy the World Trade Center. This offer has even been distributed to the engineering faculties of major universities around the world. Guess what -- NOT ONE SINGLE TAKER. Why? Because it is IMPOSSIBLE for the towers to have collapsed the way they did WITHOUT explosives, and anyone who analyzes it for any length of time will figure this out very quickly.

Here's a challenge to YOU: Why don't you commission an engineering whiz to respond to Mr. Walter's challenge, win the million bucks and split the purse? After all, the money is going begging. And remember, Walter is not asking anyone to construct another tower! He's only asking for a detailed mathematical analysis.

"I cannot tolerate your conspiracy theory..."

The only "conspiracy theory" is the "official" version of 9/11 - that 19 amateur Arabs armed with boxcutters, led by a man on a dialysis machine in a cave in Afghanistan, outwitted the multi-trillion-dollar defense apparatus of the most technologically advanced superpower in our solar system by flying FOUR jumbo jets around the country for TWO HOURS without triggering ONE single fighter intercept. Never mind that these nineteen brigands boarded the four aircraft without reservations, without issued tickets, without boarding passes, without ID checks, and without their names appearing on a single passenger manifest. (Let's overlook the little fact that seven of the nineteen are proven to be alive and well in the Middle East today.) You see, there's simply too much material to cover in an email. Besides -- and not meaning to appear condescending -- I will say this: I have spent FAR more time with YOU on this subject than I have with ANY other person.

May I suggest, first and foremost, you forget about the "who, why and how" of 9/11, and stick to science, logic, and common sense regarding the actual events. That's the ONLY intelligent way to begin to approach this subject. The moment you think about the "plot", you quickly lose sight of the FACTS. Stay focused, and let the NEW investigation we seek determine the "who, why, and how".

For now, all you need to realize is this: not only is the "official" story, point for point, an outright, demonstrable lie, it is impossible.

As a primer to continued discussion, I must request that you read "The New Pearl Harbor", and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions", both by Prof. David Ray Griffin.

If you do NOT read these two books - generally considered the definitive treatment of the subject -- I respectfully ask that we conclude this dialog forthwith.

Our exchanges would be futile if the foundation is not first properly set. Indeed, it would be a complete waste of our time.

But for the moment, may I suggest we forget about the Twin Towers altogether. Let's forget about freefall times. Let's even forget about the lakes of MOLTEN METAL in the basements [even a hundred million gallons of kerosene couldn't have done that.]

Instead, do me a favor and visit http://911research.com/talks/b7/videos.html and watch the collapse of Building 7, a 47-storey steel-framed skyscraper, from THREE DIFFERENT camera angles. Perfect, demolition style symmetrical collapse at the speed of gravity.

I'll even send you PBS footage of the building's owner, Larry Silverstein, ADMITTING ON CAMERA that he gave the order to "pull it".

Then, tell me with a straight face that what you see is NOT a controlled demolition. Now, planning and configuring a building of this type and size for a pull would literally take MONTHS. It absolutely could not have been set up for a pull on the day of 9/11. It was done before. The structure was pre-configured for a pull months in advance, likely during its construction phase. Look at all of the skyscraper fires in history, including the very recent ones. None of the buildings collapsed due to fires which burned for much longer periods and more intensely than WTC 7.

WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?

Sir, this is why 42 percent of Americans polled by Zogby last month - 70 MILLION of our compatriots -- want the 9/11 investigation re-opened.

If you agree Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition, your journey of discovery is ready to begin. If you don't, I'm afraid your state of denial and cognitive dissonance is incurable.