Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (3 page)

T
HE
WTC
TWIN TOWERS DEBATE
The events of September 11 have produced what must be the most widely viewed news footage ever shot. On the face of it, you might think that there is no mystery at all about the events that have been so famously recorded. Arab terrorists hijacked four aircraft before flying two of them into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon and the fourth into a Pennsylvania field. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. Given that Al-Qaeda is not only a terrorist organization with a deep hatred of the United States but is also responsible for a previous attack on the World Trade Center, that is the end of the story, surely?

Well, not as far as the conspiracy theorists are concerned. They maintain that what we saw was a staged political stunt. And who was responsible? Why, the United States Government of course. Depending on which version of the theory you subscribe to, the government either allowed a real Al-Qaeda attack to take place without preventing it or they carried out the whole operation themselves. So what possible evidence could there be for such an apparently outrageous supposition?

Much of the more responsible conspiracy speculation focuses upon the lead-up to the attacks. As detailed in the section of this book that deals with the Bush–Bin Laden connection (see
here
), the United States Government was supplied with a considerable amount of intelligence that suggested that Al-Qaeda were planning an attack. While most of us might be inclined to put the government's lack of reaction down to incompetence, the more cynically minded see it as part of a deliberate pattern.

Let us begin by looking at the key events in detail, starting with the incident in which the two aircraft crashed into the twin towers of the WTC. To most observers, what happened seems simple enough: planes hit towers and explode, towers fall down. But it wasn't long before this version of the events became the subject of apparently well-informed speculation. The debate focused on whether or not the impact of the aircraft, coupled with the subsequent fire, would really be enough to bring down such huge structures.

What really brought down the twin towers?
According to some experts, buildings 1, 2, and 7 of the World Trade Center are the only steel frame structures in history to have collapsed because of fire. Particularly controversial, because it had not been hit by an aircraft at all, is the fate of building number 7 of the World Trade Center, which collapsed some hours after the two main towers. Furthermore, according to one demolition expert, the huge clouds of concrete dust that were seen billowing out of the towers were symptomatic of an explosion rather than a fire. Other alleged experts claim that the way in which the towers fell straight down had every appearance of controlled demolition. Finally, the wreckage from the towers appeared to contain molten steel. Fire would not cause steel to become molten – but a bomb would. The conspiracy theorists are clear about what these alleged facts add up to. They claim that the towers of the World Trade Center must have been rigged with explosives in order to make sure that the disaster was as dramatic as possible. Then there is the Pentagon. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon was able to fly towards the building for forty minutes without being intercepted, despite the existence of sophisticated radar technology and antimissile batteries – not to mention the building's proximity to Andrews Air Force Base. When the aircraft finally hit the building it collided with the west wing, which was nearly empty at the time because of construction work. Once again, government complicity is the clear implication of this event to the conspiracy theorists. Perhaps the most famous piece in this particular conspiracy jigsaw is the notorious footage of President Bush reading a story to children in a kindergarten at the time that an aide announced that the first plane had struck the WTC. Instead of leaping into action the President simply carried on reading the story. In Michael Moore's film
Fahrenheit 9/11
the footage was used to provide the implication that Bush knew exactly what was going on. Further suspicious behaviour, in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists, came in the days following the attack. The government has neither produced the voice recorders nor the flight data recorders ("black boxes") from the aircraft that were involved in the New York attack. That has never happened in any previous major domestic crash. They have also failed to comment on whether or not the black boxes were recovered from the wreckage. There are also anomalies relating to the identity of the hijackers. Given the general level of decimation, much doubt has been cast on the discovery, near the twin towers, of an undamaged passport belonging to one of the hijackers. Furthermore, the identities of the nineteen hijackers are much disputed. Waleed al-Shehri, one of the men named as being a hijacker by the FBI on their 9/11 attacks web page, has turned up alive and protested his innocence. The identities of three other hijackers are also now in doubt.

F
LIGHT
93:
THE TRUE STORY
The story of Flight 93, the fourth of the planes to be hijacked on September 11, has become a modern legend. The passengers on Flight 93 were in a different situation to those in the other aircraft, who cannot have known that the hijackers were planning to turn the planes into flying bombs. On Flight 93, however, thanks to the mobile phone, passengers were soon made all too aware of what was planned for them. Their plane was in the Washington region so it was more than likely that they were heading for the White House. If they just sat there and did nothing they were certain to die. Gradually, as we know from the final anguished phone calls to loved ones, the passengers decided to fight back. One of them, Todd Beamer, uttered the immortal words: "Let's roll".

And then there was silence. No more phone calls. The next thing anyone knows for certain is that Flight 93, a Boeing 757, crashed in rural Pennsylvania, near the town of Shanksville. The accepted story is that the passengers rose up and wrested control from the hijackers and that in the course of the struggle the plane went out of control and plunged into the ground. The passengers had sacrificed their lives in order that many more would be saved. They have been given the status of American heroes.

Today, there are not many who would dispute that the passengers were indeed heroes. However, there are plenty who wonder just exactly what caused the plane to plummet to the earth in such a way and who question the received story of the events.

The final phone call
Essentially, the crash of Flight 93 is the subject of two alternative theories. The first of these maintains that there was an explosion on board the plane. This notion is given substance by the fact that in his final phone call a passenger said that one of the hijackers claimed to be carrying a bomb. The remaining option is that the aircraft was shot down on the orders of the United States Government before it could hit its target. This is the theory that has aroused much controversy with its suggestion that the government could have authorized the deaths of its own people.

So what evidence is there to suggest that such a thing might have happened? Well, first there is the timescale. By the time Flight 93 crashed everyone knew what had happened to the WTC twin towers and the Pentagon. A frantic search of United States airspace was taking place in order to establish whether or not any other planes had been hijacked. The United States Government acknowledges that the first fighters with the mission to intercept took off at 8.52 a.m. and another set of fighters took off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington at 9.35 a.m. – precisely the time that Flight 93 turned through almost 180 degrees and started heading straight for Washington. At that time the F-16s were no more than ten minutes flying time away, yet it was to be another thirty minutes before Flight 93 crashed. Surely one would have expected one of the F-16s to have reached the plane well before 10.06 a.m.?

To back up this line of thinking, there is evidence from a federal flight controller, published a few days later in New Hampshire. He said that an F-16 had been "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet and "must have seen the whole thing". Also, immediately before the crash took place CBS television briefly reported that two F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. All fairly suspicious, but the question remains: would the United States Government shoot its own plane down like that?

On 16 September Vice-President Dick Cheney announced that President Bush had authorized the Air Force pilots to shoot down hijacked commercial aircraft. This statement strongly supports the allegation that the F-16s that took off from Washington had been ordered to "protect the White House at all costs".

One might expect that the crash scene would offer a clear indication as to whether the aircraft was hit by a missile in the air or had simply hit the ground. This is where the controversy really starts to rage. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the forensic evidence points to the plane having been brought down by a mid-air impact. The key evidence they cite is the wide dispersal of the aircraft's debris. Letters and other light refuse from the plane were discovered eight miles from the scene of the crash. The aircraft had disintegrated into pieces no more than two inches long and a section of one of the engines, which in itself weighed a ton, was found 600 yards from the site of the crash. Other remains of the plane were found two miles away near a town called Indian Lake. Furthermore, the debris was not scattered evenly along the route between the different sites but was grouped into distinct clusters. This, the conspiracy theorists argue, is clear evidence that debris was blown out of the plane by an initial midair explosion.

The mysterious white plane
The FBI, for its part, waved these suspicions away. The paper debris that was found eight miles away, they said, was blown there by the wind, while the engine section flew 600 yards due to the force of the aircraft's impact with the ground. They concluded that: "Nothing was found that was inconsistent with the plane going into the ground intact."

And if all this was not enough there is one final mystery that the conspiracy theorists point to: the mystery of the "white plane". Several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white plane flying very low just before Flight 93 crashed. At first the FBI denied that there had been any such plane in the neighbourhood. Then, as eyewitnesses continued to insist that they had seen such an aircraft, they announced that there had been a plane after all, a civilian business jet. Because it had been flying within twenty miles of Flight 93 the authorities had requested the pilot to descend from 37,000ft to 5,000ft in order to survey the crash site and transmit the map co-ordinates "for responding emergency crews". If anything, this explanation made the conspiracy theorists all the more suspicious. Firstly, by this time all non-military aircraft within the United States airspace had received clear orders to land at the nearest airport. Secondly, at a time of such uncertainty, and with F-16s supposedly in the vicinity, it seems utterly implausible that the military would seek assistance from the pilot of a civilian aircraft that just happened to be in the area.