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9-11 Archive 2002

9-11 Evidence Hidden from Public

October 23, 2002

The continuing secrecy surrounding the events of Sept.11 makes the work of independent investigators and publishers all the more essential to understanding what really happened.

"The most detailed analysis of how and why the World Trade Center collapsed could be forever kept from the public," the Associated Press reported Sept. 30. The evidence being withheld includes "rare photos and videos" that have been "collected," documentary evidence, maps of the debris piles, and three-dimensional computerized images of the fallen towers, according to the New York Times.

The evidence that is locked away, and may be permanently sealed, has been "gathered largely in secret" by experts who are forbidden by confidential agreements from discussing their findings, except with federal investigators, said Gerald McKelvey, a spokesman for Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the office space in the twin towers.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the Trade Center complex, said in a statement that access to documents would be decided on a "case-by-case basis consistent with applicable law and policy."

Silverstein obtained control of the World Trade Center property a mere six weeks before the terror attacks by securing the 99-year lease with an initial payment of $100 million, most of which was reported to be borrowed funds. Silverstein is currently seeking to win some $7 billion on his relatively minuscule investment by suing the insurance companies and claiming that the WTC attacks constituted "two separate occurrences," rather than one.

The secret "expert analysis" is considered more authoritative than the investigation conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which "suffered from too few resources and a lack of access to critical information," according to AP. The secrecy surrounding Sept.11 has succeeded in keeping the American public in the dark about what truly caused the collapse of the twin towers, as well as the 47-story WTC-7, built by Silverstein in 1987. WTC-7 mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.

Serious questions also abound about what actually struck the Pentagon and why no evidence of a commercial jet was found at the site. I have worked with a number of independent investigators to uncover the most important information about the attacks. One American author, Eric Hufschmid, has written a book about 9-11, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, which presents compelling evidence that the attacks were "a scam of immense proportions."

He says that explosives were used to take down the towers and WTC-7 and that the Arab "terrorists" were mere patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John Kennedy. It is a well-written and illustrated book that contains rare photos of great importance, some of which are certain to be among those the government is trying to hide. The high-quality large-format photos provide important evidence about what caused the collapses at the World Trade Center, WTC-7, and the Pentagon. The book presents photographic evidence to support the theory that the twin towers of the World trade center were brought down using radio-controlled explosives. He says the emergency command center, a hardened bunker on the 23rd floor of WTC-7, was the actual control center for the attack, and that the two airplanes that hit the towers appear to have been guided by a homing signal coming from the bunker.

WTC-7 was a most unusual building. While the hardened bunker on the 23rd floor had its own air and water supply, it had no accommodations for sleeping, which raises the obvious question about what kind of emergency it was designed for. The WTC-7 building was subsequently destroyed by controlled demolition that lasted 18 seconds according to seismic data, yet the actual collapse took less that 10 seconds in the late afternoon. The other powerful blasts were to destroy the evidence from the hardened bunker, according to the author.

The remarkable photos in Painful Questions show the top 30 floors of the South Tower tipping and falling in one piece, yet solid pieces of this section never hit the ground.

How can it be, Painful Questions asks, that the towers collapsed floor-by-floor as quickly as free-falling debris fell through the open air? The video and seismic evidence show that the towers collapsed in 8 to 10 seconds, which is how long a falling object dropped from the top of the tower would take to hit the ground. The resistance of the undamaged base of the tower would have significantly slowed the collapse of the towers. For 110 floors to shatter in about nine seconds, each floor would have shattered in the blink of an eye. he says, "There should have been a thump, thump, thump and the collapsing rubble impacted the floor below, but the video shows that the floors did not encounter any resistance as they fell."

Painful Questions explains how explosives could accomplish this trick. Photos of debris being spewed horizontally hundreds of feet raise further questions about whether it was precision-timed explosions or "compression" which caused the towers to disintegrate, sending pulverized concrete and bits of steel flying over lower Manhattan.

John Iannarelli of the FBI's national press office told me the bureau has "no evidence" of explosions at the WTC and that "compression" pulverized the concrete and sent steel beams flying horizontally for hundreds of feet. Others say this is evidence that explosives were used. While the Pentagon attack has been largely obscured by the collapses at the World Trade center, there are as many unanswered questions about what actually happened at the Pentagon.

In October, two books about 9/11 by French author Thierry Meyssan arrived in the United States. Meyssan focused on the Pentagon attack on his books, which have been translated from French, 9-11: the Big Lie and Pentagate. The publisher, Patrick Pasin, said the television show "60 Minutes" was coming to France to interview Meyssan and that the author is now willing to travel the United states to discuss his work.

Meyssan presents photographic evidence that challenges the claim that a large passenger jet struck the Pentagon. He posits that an air-launched cruise missile, painted to look like a commercial jet, struck the Pentagon. I have repeatedly asked the Pentagon, American Airlines, and the FBI for basic information about the 9-11 attack, in particular about the unexplained pieces of debris, assumed to be a piece of an American Airlines jet, that was photographed on the Pentagon lawn. After numerous requests for clarification about the status of the large piece of debris, Lt. Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the Department of defense, finally said, "It's not a Pentagon issue."

As American Airlines routinely forwards all 9-11 information requests to the FBI, I turned to FBI headquarters in Washington. The FBI's Iannarelli said: "It is no secret that an airplane hit the Pentagon."

However, the object that bored a smooth seven-foot round hole through six-reinforced concrete walls in the three rings of the Pentagon left no traces of itself behind. "The plane that struck the Pentagon was pulverized," Iannarelli said. "Never was any large piece of anything recovered at the Pentagon crash site," he said.

Asked whether the dense steel landing gear, which had carried right on through the WTC twin towers and landed blocks away, had been found at the Pentagon, Iannarelli said, "nothing that was recognizable" as coming from an airplane was found.

There are no clear seismic signals, which can be associated with the crash of a 100-ton airplane into the Pentagon, according to seismologists. I asked Maryland-based seismologist Gerald Baum about the lack of seismic evidence from the Pentagon crash. If a large jet aircraft traveling 400 miles per hour struck the Pentagon, why did it not result in any recorded seismic shock waves?

Baum said that that although the seismometers near the Pentagon are "state-of-the-art," the fact that the Pentagon was built on swampland on a base that is "all fill" means the impact is less likely to have resulted in seismic shock waves because the building "is not anchored to the bedrock."

Readers of Gen. Ben Partin's investigation of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city have concluded that Tim McVeigh was a patsy. Hufschmid says he "soon realized what AFP readers have known for long time; namely, that a lot of critical information is being hidden by our corrupt media and government."