GOVERNMENT DEBUNKING OF 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES IS JUST MORE MISINFORMATION IN PLAIN SIGHT

From: [link to usinfo.state.gov]
a US government (mis)information website that 'corrects' all those conspiracy theories out there. So you can rest assured that it speaks the (cough!) truth. My rebutals of what it calls 'information' about 9/11 are added below in pairs of brackets at the end of relevant passages from the website, which are enclosed by quotation marks.
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"9/11 Revealed?
New book repeats false conspiracy theories

9/11 Revealed, published in August 2005, is the latest book putting forth bizarre conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Its two British authors, Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan, give credence to a hodgepodge of sinister, unfounded allegations.

The book claims a drone Boeing 757, or a smaller plane painted in American Airlines colors, hit the Pentagon, but ignores the fact that forensic specialists identified the crew and passengers of American Airlines flight 77 from remains found in the Pentagon, proving irrefutably that the flight hit the Pentagon."

<<It does NOT ignore them. It disbelieves them! The book simply suggests that either these forensic specialists were part of the secret 9/11 plot wrongly blamed on Al Qaeda and they lied about what they claimed to find or that they were given body parts that never came from the Pentagon crash site, with bits of identification from the REAL passengers planted on the parts. Unbelievable? Think about it.....>>

"The book claims the World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers collapsed because they were pre-rigged with explosives but ignores an extraordinarily thorough, three-year investigation by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST)."

<<Oh yeah? Very independent institute, of course. Guess we can trust these government employees to investigate impartially and not just tell the government what it wanted to hear and what, anyway, nearly everyone in the world believed at the time. LOL!>>

"NIST concluded the towers collapsed because the impact of the plane crashes severed and damaged support columns and dislodged fireproofing insulation from the steel floor trusses and support columns, which allowed the fires to weaken them to the point where they bowed, buckled, and failed. It recently stated, in the WTC Towers Report (p. 12) on its Web site, that it found “no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition.”"

<<Well, it wouldn't, would it? I mean, how would a group of Arabs who could not even fly a Cessna, according to their flight instructors, ever manage to smuggle high explosives into three buildings and then wire it all up? They would have need accomplices. Ah! Conspiracy! We cannot have that! So let's ignore all the evidence we find that suggests the buildings were deliberately blown up. "What the mind does not want to know, the eyes won't see.">>

"The book suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which also collapsed on September 11, was intentionally demolished, citing a comment by the property owner that he had decided to “pull it.” The property owner was referring to pulling a contingent of firefighters out of the building in order to save lives because it appeared unstable."

<<Pull the other one! Believe that and you will believe anything. If Silverstein had meant that, he would have said, referring to the firemen: "pull them out." The semantic difference is HIGHLY significant, and will be ignored only by those like you who don't want to believe that WTC7 could have been demolished because this then raises the possibility that the two other towers could have fallen down for the same reason.>>

"The book repeats long-standing rumors of insider trading based on alleged advance warnings of the attack. It ignores the conclusion in The 9/11 Commission Report that all trades that initially appeared suspicious were found to have innocuous causes, after an exhaustive investigation."

<<Yeah, yeah. A commission that was stacked with Bush yesmen, CIA people, politicans and establishment figures who - as with the Warren Commission - had already made up their minds who were the culprits and did not see any need to look further for signs of a larger conspiracy (and who would not have DARED to report it, even if they DID have suspicions). There was never an "exhaustive" investigation. It has been claimed by 9/11 investigators that it was quickly terminated after evidence turned up pointing to CIA front companies or people. Whatever the truth of this, your attempt to turn this damning evidence into a myth is highly unconvincing because it asks us to believe the very people who had political reasons not to uncover the real facts.>>

"The book takes the bizarre position that the September 11 attacks were not real terrorist attacks and were somehow designed to “limit casualties.” Apparently, the largest terrorist event in history was not large enough to convince the books’ authors that it was real."

<<Evidently the author of this silly debunking exercise has never heard of "false-flag" terrorist operations that get your enemy blamed for an act he did not carry out in order to justify to the general public your pre-arranged military response to wipe him out. In such an operation 'collateral damage' may be limited in order to avoid hurting those who are on your side, politically speaking. So it makes perfect sense to ask why there were not even more casualities that day.>>


"The Attack on the Pentagon

Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that American Airlines flight 77 was not hijacked and flown into the Pentagon but that, instead, “a drone Boeing 757 is used or a smaller, more manageable plane painted in American Airlines colors.”

Facts: This theory ignores the fact that the passenger and crew remains from American Airlines flight 77 were recovered at the Pentagon crash site. A team of more than 100 forensic specialists and others identified 184 of the 189 people who died in the Pentagon attack (125 from the Pentagon and 64 onboard American Airlines flight 77). All but one of the passengers onboard American Airlines flight 77 was positively identified as a match with DNA samples provided by the families of the crash victims, as reported in the Washington Post on November 21, 2001."

<<Says who? Only the US Government says so. But we cannot trust what it claims if, indeed, it participated in a massive deception on 9/11. Has any independent group of forensic experts been allowed to see the 'evidence' (clothes, bodies) and check these claims? No. We are asked to take the government's word for it? This is an administration which has now acquired a reputation to be the most corrupt bunch of liars concerning the reasons for attacking Iraq (and much else) ever known in the history of American politics!>>

"This provides irrefutable proof that American Airlines flight 77, not a drone or other aircraft, crashed into the Pentagon on September 11."

<<It does nothing of the sort. Having to rely on anonymous witnesses who may - consciously or unconsciously - be part of a well-designed cover-up and who were never independently cross-examined by lawyers in a court of law hardly amounts to "irrefutible evidence.">>

"The Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers

Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers occurred because not the terrorists flew airliners filled with jet fuel into them, but because the towers were “pre-rigged with explosives.”

Facts: The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted an extremely thorough, three-year investigation into what caused the WTC twin towers to collapse, as explained on NIST’s WTC Web site. Some 200 staff reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than one thousand people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they collapsed. Its conclusion is that the twin towers collapsed because the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns and dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, which meant that the subsequent fire, which reached 1000 degrees Celsius, weakened the floors and columns to the point where they bowed and buckled, causing the towers to collapse."

<<How odd that such fires should cause such massive buildings to collapse completely whereas much fiercer burning for many more hours in comparable skyscapers like the one in Madrid last year never had this effect! No steel tower before or after 9/11 has been known to collapse due to fire. If the floors had collapsed according to the official 'pancake theory,' the loss of momentum acquired by successive impacts of floors with undamaged floors would have slowed up the fall of the tower relative to the speed of an object in free fall. Instead, the times of descent of both WTC1 and WTC2 are consistent with each WHOLE tower having fallen freely under gravity without ANY slowing up due to resistance from hitting undamaged, stationary floors. So NIST is asking us to accept a scenario that not only has never been repeated elsewhere but which also breaks Newton's Third Law: "to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction," i.e., that the floors were not slowed up in their descent as they hit the ones below them but, instead, fell freely despite this! In other words, they are asking us to believe in a miracle that suspended the laws of physics on 9/11!>>

"NIST’s Draft Summary Report stated (pp. 171-172):

The two aircraft hit the towers at high speed and did considerable damage to principal structural components: core columns, perimeter columns, and floors. However, the towers withstood the impacts and would have remained standing were it not for the dislodged insulation and the subsequent multifloor fires.

In WTC 1, the fires weakened the core columns and caused the floors on the south side of the building to sag. The floors pulled the heated south perimeter columns inward, reducing their capacity to support the building above. Their neighboring columns quickly became overloaded as the south wall buckled. The top section of the building titled to the south and began its descent."

<<And what a smooth, unimpeded descent it was, wasn't it?! No great chunks of concrete left. Instead, nearly everything conveniently turned virtually into powder as it fell, with great blasts of the gray stuff coming out of the windows of the upper floors EVEN BEFORE THE BUILDINGS BEGAN TO FALL! LOL! Hmmmm. Now, I wonder how the simple breaking apart of a building and the impact of material upon material could generate sufficient kinetic energy to pulverise into dust massive blocks of concrete so high up in the tower? And the collapse of the two buildings into their own footprint was so neat!? Even TV man Dan Rather had to remark that it looked like a demolition. Gee! It was a demolition man's dream job, what happened that day. Yes, indeed, it actually was....>>

"In WTC 2, the core was damaged severely at the southeast corner …. The steady burning fires on the east side of the building caused the floors there to sag. The floors pulled the heated east perimeter columns inward, reducing their capacity to support the building above. Their neighboring columns quickly became overloaded as the east wall buckled. The top section of the building tilted to the east and to the south and began its descent."

<<Firemen who went up the building reported by radio that the fire was not particularly strong and could easily be dealt with by them. This was confirmed by a photo now available on the internet of a woman standing near the entry point of one of the planes. Of course, the heat did not need to be great enough to cause steel to melt - only for it to become hot enough to weaken in tensile strength. But there is now a strong case supported by evidence that the fires neither were intense enough nor lasted long enough to cause the amount of buckling of steel girders and supports required by the official scenario. It has never happened in any other steel building before or since 9/11 - even with stronger fires burning longer. What made WTC1 and WTC2 so different?>>

"The WTC towers would likely not have collapsed under the combined effects of aircraft impact and the extensive, multifloor fires if the thermal insulation had not been widely dislodged or had been only minimally dislodged by aircraft impact."

<<So enough insulation cladding was removed in both cases by the impact of each plane to make the fires weaken the tensile strength of girders sufficiently to cause collapse? How very convenient for the official theory! And how very unbelievable.>>

"In September 2005, NIST issued a clarification in its WTC Towers Report, stating:

NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001."

<<Hardly surprising. How many people believe that it was ever looking for such evidence at the time? LOL! And even if it had been, such evidence would have quickly been suppressed and omitted from the unbelievably myopic report that NIST issued.>>

"NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers. Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward, until the dust clouds obscured the view."

<<That's a strawman. Who said missiles were fired at the towers to cause their collapse? Some 9/11 investigators have explained the flash of light seen momentarily in videos of the plane just before it hit the tower in terms of a missile fired from it. But no one, as far as I know, has proposed that the collapse of the tower was due to this missile alone. The theory behind it is that the missile was meant to create a hole that would allow a clean entry of the plane so that no bits would break off at impact and fall to the ground, where they could be identified as not belonging to the type of plane that was supposed to have hit the tower.>>

"The Collapse of World Trade Center 7

Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished. The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds. Mr. Silverstein said:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, you know, “We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it.” And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.

9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein’s suggestion to “pull it” is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.

Facts: On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:

Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings. The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of WTC Tower 1."

<<Well, well! If you believe that, you will believe anything. The fire was confined to two floors and so minor, according to subsequent, now public statements by firemen on the scene, that you don't have to be an experienced fireman to realise that such an insignificant fire could cause the oh-so-neat (!) collapse of a 47-floor building.>>

"In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building."

<<Oh, no, Mr McQuillan! Silverstein never said anything about THAT in his interview, so don't put words into his mouth that he never said at the time, even though he wants to say them now. That's pure post hoc invention, inserted to justify the spin you have given - no doubt on his orders - to what he actually said.>>

"Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, “I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.” Mr. McQuillan has stated that by “it,” Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building."

<<Well, he would say that NOW, wouldn't he? In fact he HAD to say that through you, Mr McQuillan, in order to suppress the suggestion that, if WTC7 could so easily be demolished in a few hours in a controlled way, the same might be true for WTC1 and WTC2. Perish the thought! We don't want people thinking that, do we? That, no doubt, was the point of Silverstein appearing in the 2002 TV documentary in the first place - he had to explain why WTC had fallen when it had not been hit directly by any plane. Instead, by saying "pull it," he let the cat out of the bag and made things worse for the official story of 9/11. McQillan's post hoc explanation of what Silverstein meant is just not credible. He would have said "Pull them out" if he had been referring to the firemen. It makes no semantic sense to say "pull it" if one is referring to withdrawing human beings. And, wow! If it were so easy for a fire to cause a steel-frame skyscaper to fall into its own footprint so cleanly, I'm sure the demolition industry would be setting fire to every such building needing to be demolished. So less expensive and time-consuming than high explosives and weeks of manpower. LOL!>>

"The National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated unequivocally, “NIST has seen no evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition,” in its Collapse of WTC 7 report (p. 6). NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that it was caused by the collapse of a critical column due to “fire and/or debris induced structural damage.” There was substantial damage to WTC 7 when the nearby WTC 1 tower collapsed and fires began shortly afterwards."

<<Really? You would not think so from the small fires seen on a couple of floors in the photos and TV footage! There is little damage to the outside of the building. Please explain how such "substantial" damage was caused to a building several hundred metres away when other buildings just as close were undamaged by comparison? LOL! Or are the laws of physics arranged only to cause damage to buildings that Larry Silverstein owns? And how on earth could the collapse of ONE "critical column" cause simultaneous collapse of the WHOLE building in a manner that is identical to how buildings collapse in a controlled demolition? Please, please explain (if you can!).>>

"Also, WTC 7 was a very unusual building because it was built over an existing Con-Edison power generation substation, which contained two large 6,000 gallon fuel tanks for the emergency generation of power. The fuel from these tanks could have contributed to the intense heat that apparently weakened the supporting columns in WTC 7."

<<Balderdash! The tanks did not explode and the fuel was not burning, otherwise the whole building would have been on fire, not just two upper floors. And what "intense heat"? The fire at WTC7 was a minor one, as fires go. It did not extend throughout the building.>>

"Insider Trading

Allegation: 9/11 Revealed repeats long-standing rumors of “insider trading [based] on advance warnings of the attack.”

Facts: The 9/11 Commission examined this issue in detail, stating, in The 9/11 Commission Report (p. 499):

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options – investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price – surged in the parent companies of United Airlines [UAL] on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 – highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC [Security and Exchange Commission] and the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous."

<<But why did the newsletter recommend trading at such a useful time? This explanation does not answer the suspicions. It merely begs the question. Who wrote this information in the newsletters, assuming that they were, indeed, solely responsible? "Securing the cooperation of many foreign governments"? Yeah. Right! As if these governments would tell the truth if they or their business friends were in on the deal. And there will be many people who would take such "investigations" with a pinch of salt. They have seen too many whitewashes and cover-ups by government inquiries and agencies ever to take the word of the SEC and FBI seriously.>>

"Absurd, Sinister Interpretations

9/11 Revealed often places the most absurd, sinister interpretations upon unremarkable occurrences in its effort to construct complex conspiracy theories. For example, it states:

According to the Kean Commission [9/11 Commission] Report (p. 168), in March 2000, [Mohammed Atta] “emailed 31 different U.S. flight schools on behalf of a small group of men from various Arab countries studying in Germany who, while lacking prior training, were interested in learning to fly in the United States.” Why would a terrorist openly approach flying schools in the USA this way?

The obvious answer, of course, is that Mohammed Atta was not afraid to openly approach flying schools in the United States because he presumably did not identify himself to them as a terrorist who wished to learn how to fly planes in order that he could crash one into the World Trade Center. This rather simple explanation seemed to have not occurred to the authors of 9/11 Revealed."

<<Not so. It is just that the authors were not as naive enough as the writer of this debunking article to believe that Arab men intent on crashing planes into American buildings would take the risk of living and learning to fly in America, thus opening themselves to being monitored by security agencies and becoming exposed, when they could have learnt how to fly in a foreign country far from the prying eyes of these agencies!! LOL! This obvious reason seemed not to have occurred to the debunker who wrote the article at the American government website.>>

"Similarly, 9/11 Revealed gives credence (p. 177) to nonsensical statements such as the one made by “Internet activist” Brian Quig: “[when Flight 77] bypassed a straight-in shot at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only to hit an insignificant spot in the back of the Pentagon, I said to myself then, it is not a real terrorist attack.”"

<<There is nothing nonsensical at all about this query. It is a legitimate question to ask why supposed terrorists intent on harming America's military would have targeted only that part of the Pentagon where there were relatively few workers instead of the back of the Pentagon, where the Chiefs of Staff and many other officals worked (Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, for example, had his office there). Why crash into the strongly reinforced front of a building, instead of its centre, where far more damage could have been caused? The fact that a relatively 'soft' area was selected is much more consistent with the motive for attacking the Pentagon proposed by conspiracy theorists than with the one offered by government hacks like you>>

"The authors of 9/11 Revealed apparently do not believe that the largest terrorist attack in history was large enough to demonstrate that it was real."

<<Don't exaggerate their argument by turning it into something larger than they intended it to be. It was not their main point, which is that there are too many anomalies that do no add up in the official story.>>

Instead, in their minds, the fact that the terrorists did not fly even larger Boeing 747 jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, or attack an hour or two later, when more people would have been at work, or hit the offices of the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, means that the events of 9/11 were not real terrorist attacks, but were engineered in order to minimize the number of deaths. 9/11 Revealed states bizarrely, “the attacks … seem almost designed to limit casualties.”

One wonders how many more thousands of people would have had to die to convince the authors of 9/11 Revealed that the attacks were real."

<<It was never the numbers of people that died that convinced the authors that the attacks were not really by terrorists. You have turned a minor argument that even 9/11 conspiracy believers might disagree with into a large plank of their thesis, which it is not. But then, debunkers like you like setting up minor arguments as though they were critical ones in order to demolish them. By doing this, you create the utterly false impression that - by refuting one weak evidence or argument - you have discredited the 1001 other strong arguments and pieces of evidence that you failed to demolish.>>

"In sum, 9/11 Revealed is a collection of unfounded conspiracy theories that bear no relationship to the tragic realities of September 11.

Created: 16 Sep 2005 Updated: 16 Sep 2005."

<<Case refuted. Must lie and debunk more convincingly, USinfo.state.gov.>>

I have offered only a handful of counterarguments to what is a multi-faceted issue. I am sure many of you here at GLP can offer numerous other rebutals (as you have done in the past), and I look forward to reading them. Others may feel that the subject has been done to death and ask what is the point. I would answer that one cannot let stupid, debunking from government websites of serious questions about 9/11 stand unanswered if one values the truth.