Date: September 11, 2001
Location: New York, New York
The Conspirators: The US government
The Victims: The American public
During the attacks on September 11, 2001, New York’s World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, was severely damaged, and United Airlines Flight 93, said to have been en route to crash into the White House, went down, and all aboard died.
The most fanatical of all conspiracy theorists believe that these were not a coordinated attack by Islamic terrorists, but were in fact a false flag attack by the American government upon its own people, intended to create anger against Islamic states and breed support for a war. These theorists claim that the Twin Towers and Building 7 had all been rigged with explosives in advance by government agents and destroyed in a controlled demolition that was set to mimic a terrorist attack.
All three buildings were destroyed by fire, the initial cause of which was the impact of the two airliners into the Twin Towers. There were no explosives used in any of them, the US government wasn’t involved, and there was nothing unexpected about their collapses from an engineering perspective.
The historical tensions between Islam and Judaism go back more than 1,000 years, and are beyond the scope of this book. But the involvement of the United States in this conflict is much newer. When Israel was created after World War II, the United States was merely one of many nations sympathetic to their cause, but in the decades since, the United States has been Israel’s most important supporter. Israel has received more financial aid from the United States than any other nation, and one big reason is its strategically important location inside the Middle East. Any bullet fired by Israel in a conflict against Islamic forces was likely paid for with American dollars; and accordingly, Islamic extremists have long had their eye on the United States as a target. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were, quite probably, eventually inevitable.
As with so many national tragedies in the United States, conspiracy-mongering started immediately. The first was that 9/11 was perpetrated by Israel, in hopes of starting a holy war against Islam. This began with a story that was widely circulated in the alternative press that 4,000 Jewish people received warning not to report to their jobs at the World Trade Center and were thus saved. Within a few months the conspiracy theories evolved into some desperately complex stories implicating governments and individuals and money and oil; everything was thrown into the pot, no matter how self-contradictory or irrational, as long as it denied the actual events that everyone witnessed on that day.
Eventually three claims emerged that were specific enough to be testable. One was that the towers fell “faster than free fall”—presumably, the speed at which debris would fall if not connected to any supported structures—though it has never been made clear why this might be or what it would prove. Second was the fact that jet fuel—the principal accelerant that started the fires—burns at a maximum temperature of 1500°F and steel melts at 2750°F. Therefore, said the theorists, there is no possible way that the fires started by the airliner crashes could have caused the buildings’ structures to fail. The third point emerged a few years later, when Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease on Building 7, said in a TV interview that he told the firefighters to “pull it,” and the conspiracy theorists took this as an order to detonate the explosives. This, of course, indicated to them that Silverstein himself was a key member of the conspiracy.
Let’s put the first conspiracy theory—about 9/11 being a Jewish plot—to rest right away. There was no email. No Jewish people or people of any other religious background stayed home because they had been forewarned about the attack. In fact, many Jewish people died on 9/11 along with people of every religion and nationality.
Also, the argument that the towers fell faster than free fall has never been made in a rational way. First of all, there is no one “free-fall” speed. A parachute has a much slower free-fall speed than, say, a bowling ball. Now, while the billowing dust clouds make it impossible to accurately say exactly how long it took each tower to collapse, most of these claimants say it took about sixteen seconds. Calculations show that a standard steel I-beam of the type used to form the structure of such buildings would take about nine seconds to fall the height of the Twin Towers. The videos of the Twin Towers collapsing make it clear that the beams from the sides of the building fall away much faster than the core collapses all the way down, which makes it easy to see that this theory is false. The cores of the buildings clearly collapsed more slowly than the debris coming off of them fell.
When it comes to the theory about the melting point of steel, let’s just clarify and say that nobody ever claimed that the steel girders in the buildings had to melt (i.e., liquefy) for the buildings to collapse. They only needed to soften a bit. Blacksmiths prove that steel glows red and can be worked into any shape at only 560°F, far less than the 1500°F at which jet fuel burns. So there was nothing unexpected about all three buildings’ structural failure from fire alone. There have been many other examples of this happening throughout history. For example, citywide firestorms triggered by attacks in World War II destroyed hundreds of tall, steel-framed buildings that were not otherwise damaged. Twisted steel girders and other reminders are on public display at the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Tokyo, Japan, the Imperial War Museums in London, England, and the Dresden City Museum in Dresden, Germany, for anyone who would like to personally inspect how dramatically fire alone can mangle a steel building structure.
Finally, on the claim that Larry Silverstein ordered the demolition triggered by telling the firemen to “pull it”: a direct inquiry to Controlled Demolition, Inc. (the world’s largest demolition contractor) revealed that they have never used that term for triggering a demolition, nor have they ever heard it used elsewhere in the industry. In a PBS interview, Silverstein recounted a phone call he received from the fire department commander as they were fighting the fires that raged inside Building 7. The firemen had reported structural groaning and an ominous bulge on the building’s exterior between the 10th and 13th floors. Fearing an imminent collapse, the commander recommended pulling the battalion out of the building, which Silverstein agreed to as evidenced by the fact that those firemen were no longer in the building when it did collapse shortly thereafter. Silverstein recounted:
I said, “We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.” And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.
In any case, the claim had been illogical from the beginning. If the final go/no-go decision had been Silverstein’s to make, the basic narrative would have been that a government conspiracy led by President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld organized everything and had the building somehow surreptitiously wired with explosives, a multi-month job that nobody noticed. Then, on the day of the attack, they put the actual go/no-go decision into the hands of the building’s owner (for some reason), and then had him go on national TV and reveal to the world that the demolition had been deliberate. If that was their strategy, it was not a wise one.