Science casting doubt over 9/11 official story

As the 9/11 terrorist attack reaches its 17th anniversary, two wars continue to be waged in its wake.

One is the “war on terror” in which hundreds of thousands have been killed in the Middle East. The other is an information war being played out in the arena of cyberspace.

This second war is a battle for our minds. On one side is much of the mainstream media, politicians, official history and prominent experts – all telling us the official version of events are true.

On the other side is another group of experts, including more than 3,000 architects and engineers who have formed their own 9/11 truth movement. These people are commonly referred to as ‘conspiracy theorists’.

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia’s entry for 9/11 conspiracies is filled with psychological explanations for why it is irrational to start questioning this horrific event, which continues to be the defining moment of the century. One reason given is that some of us need to make sense of this chaotic world and somehow find it perversely comforting believing a sinister conspiracy has taken place.

A quotation in this Wikipedia page comes from an article in the September 11, 2006, edition of Time magazine which claims the major 9/11 conspiracy theories “depend on circumstantial evidence, facts without analysis or documentation, quotes taken out of context and the scattered testimony of traumatised eyewitnesses”.

But despite the vast majority of the mainstream promoting the official story – with just a handful of journalists touching on the ‘conspiracy theories’ from a neutral perspective – the war of perception on the battlefield of 9/11 is not yet decided.

Perhaps it is because many ‘truthers’ – a label used for those challenging the official 9/11 story – are using hard science that has been made available for scrutiny in the public domain to illustrate that the official version of events does not add up.

And then there are the whistleblowers, a prominent one being 9/11 Commission Report co-chair Lee Hamilton who remarked that this report into the official version of events was “set up to fail”.

Another witness is Scott Forbes, from England, who worked at the World Trade Centre from 1998 and lost 89 of his colleagues at financial firm The Fiduciary Trust on 9/11. He has described an unusual coordinated power cut at the South building for a “recabling exercise” in the weekend before the attack, where he saw several engineers working around the ground-floor lobby and at the lobby on floor 78.

He tried over the next three years to get an explanation for the work, but claimed he was eventually told by the New York Port Authority - the leaseholder for the World Trade Centre buildings - that no power down operation took place.

LISTEN: Interview of Scott Forbes carried out by investigative journalist Tony Gosling in 2004 http://www.radio4all.net/files/[email protected]/2149-1-ScottForbes.mp3

The events of 9/11 were so horrific that to question what we were being told by officials was perhaps too painful to even consider for most of us, including journalists.

And so many of us accepted the story of a passport of one of the alleged hijackers, Satam al-Suqami, being found in Vesey Street, Lower Manhattan, before the buildings collapsed.

In the 17 years which have followed, more and more science has been put forward claiming to show that the official reasons given for the three World Trade Centre buildings collapsing break the laws of physics.

If you didn’t know three buildings fell in New York on 9/11 (I certainly didn’t until recently), type into the YouTube search box “Building 7 falling” – an interesting watch to say the least.

WATCH: Video evidence from Rethink911.org (an arm of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth) showing Building 7 falling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mamvq7LWqRU

Another aspect in the war over 9/11 perception involves the dark arts. In 2008, Harvard professors Cass Sunstein (who was later made director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) and Adrian Vermeule proposed in a Harvard Public Law Working Paper – titled Conspiracy Theories – that the US government should engage in “cognitive infiltration” of citizen groups which seek the truth about 9/11.

They wrote in the paper: “Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

Some 9/11 investigators have put forward theories that claim secret energy weapons were used to take down the buildings. Dr Judy Wood is one notable contributor in this area.

WATCH: A documentary, Irrefutable, covering much of Dr Judy Wood's work in regard to 9/11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlkZLlzOfVQ

And some have forensically analysed amateur video footage of the event to propose no planes actually hit the buildings at all, and that holographic images of planes were used to disguise missiles. Investigative journalist Richard D Hall has carried out extensive research in this field.

Others, including Danish chemist Niels Harrit, claim nano-thermite may have been used to bring the World Trade Centre buildings down into their own footprints. Harritt, in a peer-reviewed paper, claimed to have found “active thermitic material" in dust from 9/11.

Perhaps the strongest scientific evidence challenging the 9/11 official story was put forward late last year.

A $300,000 investigation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks – crowd-funded through Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (a non-profit organisation challenging the official story of 9/11 with 25,000 members as of last month including 3,020 architects and engineers) – was set up to challenge the ‘science’ presented by the US government-funded National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) .

NIST claimed in its 2008 Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Centre Building 7 that the 47-storey structure fell because of prolonged office fires causing structural failure.

But this is something that has never occurred in any other steel-framed high-rise building before 9/11, according to civil engineer and firefighter Adrian Mallett, speaking in the 9/11 documentary, Incontrovertible.

Dr Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbank’s research team says their findings have so far established that Building 7 – which was not hit by a plane – could not have fallen because of these office fires.

Dr Hulsey and his team are continuing to investigate the reasons why Building 7 fell and hope to have reached a conclusion on that before the end of this year.

LISTEN: Herny Widdas's interview with investigative journalist and author David Icke in which they discuss motive for the 9/11 attack https://www.lep.co.uk/news/opinion/david-icke-my-unanswered-9-11-questions-1-9196768

Almost one third of people globally see the official story of 9/11 as exactly that – a story – according to University of Maryland-based research group WorldPublicOpinion.org

But without a new official inquiry into 9/11 - or a sustained effort from the mainstream media to forensically re-examine the events - the war of perception over what actually happened on September 11, 2001, may still be waged for years to come.

WATCH: Documentary, Calling Out Bravo Seven, made by firefighters, that covers much of the information in this article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJI9kcWwHE

WATCH: Documentary, 9/11 War Games, looks at a US government mock terrorist exercise being executed on the same morning of the 9/11 attack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3noExmsCRyg