INTRODUCTION

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” (Who will guard the guards themselves?)

There is a conspiracy among us, one that is poisoning our nation. No one can doubt that the tragic attacks of 9/11 were the result of a conspiracy, heretofore a term disparaged by the mass media when connected to any past event in America—whether the JFK assassination, CIA drug running, or the deaths of church members in Waco.

On September 11, 2001, widespread contempt for the word conspiracy was swept away in the attacks on the United States. No longer could a major tragic event be blamed on a lone deranged individual. The question now became who precisely was behind this conspiracy to kill Americans, a question that the US Government has so far failed to provide an adequate answer.

According to official pronouncements, the 9/11 conspiracy involved 19 suicidal Middle Eastern Muslim terrorists—their hearts full of hatred for American freedom and democracy—who used small box cutters to hijack four airliners, crashing two into the Twin Towers of New York City's World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C. The fourth airliner reportedly crashed in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to overcome the hijackers. To add insult to injury, this whole incredible “Mission Impossible” operation, which defeated a $400 billion defense system, was under the direction of a devout Muslim cleric from Saudi Arabia using cell phones and a portable computer in a cave in Afghanistan.

If this conspiracy theory sounds far-fetched or just too convenient, a closer look at the events of 9/11 reveals a huge number of disturbing and unanswered questions. This also holds true for the aftermath of the event, in which the Bush administration used their customized 9/11 conspiracy theory as a pretext for curtailing the cherished liberties of Americans.

As pointed out by thoughtful students of history, one must not be distracted by the how of an event but instead should focus on the who and the why. Accumulate the facts, though often contradictory, then concentrate on the overall process by which these events transpired. In other words, consider the overview and try to think like a good police detective: Who benefited from this crime? Who had the means, the motive, and the opportunity—not only to devise such attacks, but to circumvent normal security measures and hinder any objective investigation?

Such reasoning brings knowledge, and it is said that knowledge is power.

While many ardent 9/11 researchers have focused on specific and even technical aspects of that event—the melting temperature of structural steel, the size of the Pentagon's hole, etc.—at some point one must back off and look at a broad overview and search for deeper meanings.

The information within this book should empower Americans who long for such a wider framework and who are ready for some straight talk about the many factual anomalies, conflicting claims, and unanswered questions that still surround the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 as well as its aftermath.

Indeed, it was the provocation of the attacks of 9/11 that provided the underlying justification for all that followed—the hurried passage of The PATRIOT Act, increases in the defense and intelligence budgets, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the justifications for torture at secret prisons, the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the centralization of power around the Presidency, and the general stifling of dissent in a nation that claims to be free.

A wider framework for understanding the post-9/11 era is also offered by the Bush administration. It's called the “War on Terrorism,” yet the dictionary definition of terrorism is “organized intimidation,” simply a tactic of terrorists. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, what if President Roosevelt had declared a “War on Naval Aviation”? Yet Americans have been warned by Vice President Dick Cheney and others that this global war against a vague concept will last for many years, even decades.

Knowledge of the facts about 9/11 should have been available in print within months of the 9/11 tragedies—but it seems that freedom of the press, at least within the United States, belongs only to those who own the presses.

To those of us who follow the shadowy side of America's national life, the events of 9/11 immediately raised red flags of warning. Just one day after 9/11, I posted my initial thoughts in a piece on the Internet. Here are some excerpts:

WHO’S TRULY BEHIND THE ATTACK ON AMERICA?

Many people have compared the horrendous terrorist attack on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is an apt comparison, though not for the reasons most people think.

For true students of history, it is now beyond dispute that certain high-ranking officials in Washington, D.C. knew in advance of the Japanese intention to attack the US fleet in Hawaii, yet did nothing to prevent it.

Must the citizens of the United States wait another 50 years to learn that the 9/11 terrorist attack was allowed to take place just like Pearl Harbor? Could such an appalling scenario possibly be true?

Simple countermeasures against such an attack now seem apparent. For example, if the airlines would assign just one armed plainclothes security man to each flight, this tragedy may have been averted since apparently the hijackers were armed only with knives or other type blades. So, how were they able to overpower a plane load of people and, more importantly, gain access to the cockpits? Who taught them to fly jumbo jets?

As in the case of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the key to understanding the event lies not in who actually committed the violence but rather who was able to strip away the normal security protection.

Government and airline officials knew immediately that planes had been hijacked, yet no interceptors appeared in the air until after the attacks were completed. Who stripped away the normal security protection of America on 9/11?

At least in this most recent case, the government cannot blame the attack on a lone deranged individual, some Lee Harvey McVeigh. They must deal with a full-blown conspiracy, even though authorities were quick to point the finger at Osama bin Laden. Any investigation of bin Laden must look beyond the man, to his backers and financiers.

The trail of the terrorists will most probably become murky, with plenty of accusations for all concerned. But one thing appears quite clear, the tragic events of 9/11 play right into the hands of persons with an agenda aimed at eroding American liberties and sovereignty.

After decades of bloated and misused defense budgets, there are now calls for doubling our defense allocation. In a time of rising recognition that the CIA is an agency never sought by the public and one which has brought so much condemnation on this nation, there are now cries for doubling its size and budget. If the chief security officer for a large company fails to protect one of its most prized assets, is he more likely to be fired or have his pay doubled?

Watch for more anti-terrorist legislation to further shred the US Constitution.

As we all scramble to deal with the effects of terrorism, are we in danger of losing our few remaining individual liberties?

Also, consider that we are distracted from a faltering economy (the current crisis may require more federal financial controls), a plummeting public opinion of George W. Bush and surging energy prices.

Would leaders allow a public disaster to happen with an eye toward advancing their agendas? It's happened before… in Nero's burning Rome, Germany's gutted Reichstag, at Pearl Harbor and again at the Gulf of Tonkin.

While we should grieve for our losses, we must keep our heads. When the emotions of the moment run hot, we must remain cool and thoughtful so that we can find who is truly behind this attack on America.

I believe the basic questions and issues I raised in this posting are as valid today as in September, 2001.

And I didn't stop there. Within two months of 9/11, I had gathered a vast amount of material, much of which appears in this book (along with lots of new information) and presented it as a proposal to my publisher, HarperCollins of New York, under the title, The War on Freedom.

I was told that emotions were too high and the content too “hot” for immediate publication. Foot dragging on the book deal continued until mid-2002. At that time, several employees of the FBI and CIA had come forward to testify that they had tried to warn superiors of an impending terrorist attack. The attitude toward my book proposal softened and I signed a contract to publish the book, along with a sizeable advance.

Working feverishly throughout the summer of 2002, I produced a manuscript by my October deadline. My editor was elated with the work and predicted it would sell more than a million copies (not to brag, but based on sales of my earlier books, this was not at all implausible).

The wheels of major publishing grind slowly and it was not until March of 2003 that the book received a legal review. I had already been sent a copy of the cover and publication was just a few weeks away. The legal review, or vetting, is a process in which legal counsel verifies the source material and checks for anything that might cause a legal problem. This hurdle was passed and the last words from the attorney were, “You have satisfied me.”

Within two days, however, I was informed that a senior officer who had not even read it had canceled the book. The only justification given was that the officer “did not want to upset the families of 9/11 victims.” This was a dubious argument as by today more than 600 families have filed lawsuits and complaints against either Saudi Arabia or senior members of the Bush administration.

Under normal circumstances, if a book must be cancelled for legal reasons, the author is required to return any payments made in advance. In this case, I was paid the remainder of the entire advance. To me, this was an indication that the cancellation of the book was nothing less than sheer censorship, although the identity and motivation of the censor was not clear.

“Why would they want to prevent people from learning truths about 9/11 even if those truths were discomfiting to the public and embarrassing to government authorities?” I asked myself, still believing that I lived in a nation which valued free speech.

I proceeded to self-publish The War on Freedom, albeit with very limited distribution, and the book's reception was uniformly good despite the small circulation. Part I of that book was later published and distributed by a small California press under the title of Inside Job. The Terror Conspiracy expands, updates and replaces Inside Job and includes the three additional parts of the original War on Freedom, also greatly updated and expanded in the light of events and discoveries since 2002.

As readers kept expressing astonishment at these earlier books, I realized that the knowledge gleaned from a study of published matter, both in print and on the Internet, was indeed painting a dark picture of the persons and forces behind today's current events. I came to see that some force existed which did not want this information available to the general public. It would certainly upset the carefully constructed “official” explanations for the horrors of 9/11.

Today is a new day. The authorized story of 9/11 has been all but discredited in the eyes of an increasingly aware population, thanks to the dedicated work of scores of journalists and researchers, the rapidly growing “9/11 truth” movement, courageous government whistleblowers and even revelations from official inquiries.

As of this writing, we now know that:

■ A wide variety of standard defense mechanisms designed to prevent such an attack systematically failed on 9/11. Especially notable are the atypical failures which occurred simultaneously within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), all charged with protecting US airspace.

■ Interceptor jets were not scrambled for more than 30 minutes after it was obvious that four airliners had gone off course and were presumably hijacked. In the case of Flight 77, which reportedly slammed into the Pentagon, an hour and 45 minutes elapsed with no interception.

■ Missile batteries designed to protect Washington, D.C. failed to stop the strike on the Pentagon, one of the world's most protected structures; and fighter jets on constant alert at Andrews Air Force Base just 12 miles away were never scrambled.

■ Several war game exercises, involving both the FA A and NORAD, were being played out on the morning of September 11, 2001, which may have facilitated the attacks. Yet, there has been little or no mention of these exercises by either the major media or the 9/11 Commission.

■ President Bush proceeded with a “photo op” at a Florida elementary school even after he and his aides knew that three planes had been hijacked. He lingered in and around the classroom for nearly 20 minutes after being informed that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center (WTC).

■ Not one steel-framed building in history has collapsed solely due to fire. The free-fall speed collapse of the Trade Center towers, with attendant melted steel and powdery dust, exhibited all the characteristics of a controlled demolition.

■ Just such a controlled demolition apparently occurred about 5 pm that same day when, according to the owner of the WTC complex, the 47-story Building 7 was “pulled,” collapsing in only eight seconds into its foundation.

■ Vital evidence, including the buildings’ structural steel, was destroyed through rapid removal and destruction by US Government officials with no investigation.

■ An 8-mile-long debris trail indicated that Flight 93 was destroyed in the air rather than in the Pennsylvania crash reportedly caused by an onboard struggle between the hijackers and passengers.

■ More than a dozen countries tried to warn US authorities that an attack on American soil was imminent, some only days before the events.

■ A growing number of whistleblowers within the federal government have pointed to evidence that various agencies were well aware of the possibility of attack but were prevented from mounting investigations by senior officials.

■ In 2005, the public learned of a secret Pentagon intelligence operation codenamed “Able Danger.” The officers within this unit had identified Mohamed Atta as a potentially dangerous member of al Qaeda a full year before the 9/11 attacks.

■ Far from being a reaction to 9/11, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were the culmination of longstanding plans, which only awaited a provocation such as 9/11.

■ The official explanations for the invasion of Iraq, such as the need to capture weapons of mass destruction, have proven false while the public release of the Downing Street memo proved that officials were well aware of the weakness of this argument more than six months prior to hostilities in Iraq.

■ Within a few hours after the 9/11 events, the FBI released names and photos of the suspected hijackers although later many of those named turned up alive in the Middle East.

■ Also within hours of the attacks, FBI agents were scouring the houses, restaurants and flight schools the alleged perpetrators had frequented. If no one had foreknowledge of the hijackers or their activities, how did the FBI know where to look?

■ Far from ordering a full and objective investigation to determine who was responsible for the 9/11 tragedies, the Bush administration dragged their feet and actually took actions to impede a swift and truthful probe into the events of that day. It was nearly two years after the events that mounting pressure from the public led by the families of 9/11 victims finally forced the creation of an investigatory commission. But this commission's final report left most of the questions of these 9/11 families unanswered.

■ No one in government has been reprimanded or even scolded for what we are told was the greatest intelligence failure in US history. In fact, the very agencies which failed the nation watched their budgets increase dramatically.

■ No person in government, except former National Security Council counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, has felt the need to apologize to the American people for the 9/11 security failure.

■ President Bush himself declined to apologize for the 9/11 tragedy to either the American public or to victim's families during an April, 2004, press conference despite being presented with the opportunity to do so at least four times.

This is merely a short list of unanswered questions, anomalies and puzzles concerning the 2001 attacks.

The paucity of answers to these questions coming from official sources has prompted the growth of a nationwide 9/11 truth movement that has resulted in hundreds of websites, dozens of books and films, and numerous citizens’ inquiry conferences. More recently, a group of academics came together in early 2006 to form Scholars for 9/11 Truth. This collection of more than 50 credentialed scholars and experts was spearheaded by Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones, who made headlines when he charged that the World Trade Center collapsed because of “pre-positioned explosives.”

“We believe that senior government officials have covered up crucial facts about what really happened on 9/11,” the group says in a statement announcing its formation. “We believe these events may have been orchestrated by the administration in order to manipulate the American people into supporting policies at home and abroad.”

Key members of the group include Jones, University of Minnesota Duluth distinguished McKnight professor of philosophy Jim Fetzer, former director of the US “Star Wars” space defense program Robert M. Bowman and Texas A&M Professor Emeritus Morgan Reynolds.

Morgan Reynolds, former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, was also the chief economist for the Labor Department during the first George W. Bush administration. In mid-2005, Reynolds undoubtedly shocked his former Bush associates when he publicly declared the official story of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers “bogus” and said evidence more clearly indicated that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.

A collective paper by these scholars asked, “Did the Bush administration know in advance about the impending attacks that occurred on 9/11, and allow these to happen, to provoke pre-planned wars against Afghanistan and Iraq? These questions demand immediate answers.”

They went on to declare that they were stunned to learn that the government has brought but one indictment against an alleged perpetrator and, to the best of their knowledge, has not reprimanded anyone in positions of responsibility for incompetence or dereliction of duty. They also concluded the official conspiracy theory—that nineteen Arab hijackers under control of one man in the wilds of Afghanistan brought this about—is unsupportable by the evidential data. They even indicated that there are good reasons for suspecting that video tapes officially attributed to Osama bin Laden are not genuine. The group also found the government's own investigations of 9/11 to be “severely flawed.” For example, they pointed out that the 9/11 Commission was directed by Philip Zelikow, who had served on the National Security Council's team for the transition between the Clinton and Bush II administrations, and was the co-author of a book with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A man with close ties to the White House and a senior member of the administration's foreign policy team could hardly be expected to conduct an objective and impartial investigation. Their studies further pointed out that that The 9/11 Commission Report is filled with omissions, distortions, and factual errors. The official report, for example, entirely ignored the collapse of WTC7, a 47-story building, which was hit by no airplanes, was only damaged by a few small fires, and collapsed seven hours after the attack.

In 2006, yet another former government official broke ranks by questioning the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC7. Paul Craig Roberts served as former Assistant of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and was the man credited with the success of “Reaganomics.”

A former Wall Street Journal editor and currently an Internet columnist, Roberts wrote, “Many patriotic readers have written to me expressing their frustration that fact and common sense cannot gain a toehold in a debate guided by hysteria and disinformation. Other readers write that 9/11 shields Bush from accountability. They challenge me to explain why three World Trade Center buildings on one day collapsed into their own footprints at free fall speed, an event outside the laws of physics except under conditions of controlled demolition. They insist that there is no stopping war and a police state as long as the government's story on 9/11 remains unchallenged.

“They could be right. There are not many editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of The 9/11 Commission Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe the government told the truth about 9/11.”

Other concerned citizens went so far as to file lawsuits against the Bush administration for complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

One was attorney Stanley G. Hilton, a Republican who had served as chief of staff to Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), who in late 2004 filed a suit on behalf of 400 9/11 victims’ family members against top administration officials, including President Bush.

The suit charges that administration officials “all conspired with the government of Saudi Arabia prior to 9/11/01 to knowingly finance, encourage, recruit, permit, and aid and abet, certain individuals to carry out the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in order to orchestrate a contrived, stylized and artificial second Pearl Harbor event for the purpose of galvanizing public support for their military adventure agenda in the Middle East, and in order to persuade congress to enact their repressive patriot acts I and II for the purpose of suppressing political dissent inside the US.”

To newsmen, Hilton was even more to the point, stating that al Qaeda is simply a CIA creation and that “[t]his was a government-ordered operation.” Citing documents in his possession, Hilton said, “[Bush] personally authorized the attacks. He is guilty of treason and mass murder.”

Hilton claimed he had gained information from top military officers, FBI agents and others who asserted that high-ranking government officials were complicit in the attacks of 9/11, which were carried out under the cover of disaster drills and war games, code named “Tripod,” under the command of Vice President Cheney. He said participants were bound by official gag orders but indicated they would testify if subpoenaed.

Despite what Hilton claimed was a threat by a federal judge, he persisted in prosecuting the $7 billion suit. The was dismissed in January, 2005, by US District Court of Northern California Judge Susan Illston under an unusual ruling citing the “Doctrine of Sovereign Immunity,” which has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of a case but rather the old English contention that the “sovereign [King]” is exempt from lawsuits.

Critics of this ruling said apparently the judge reasoned that US citizens do not have the right to hold a sitting President accountable for anything, even if the charges include premeditated mass murder and premeditated acts of high treason.

A California appeals court refused to hear Hilton's case and even refused to allow him to file a brief outlining the case for government complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Such serious accusations coupled with the ever-growing wealth of information pertaining to 9/11 has prompted many honest people from all across the political spectrum to conclude that the tragic attacks of 9/11 were indeed an inside job. Indeed, one professional poll in 2004 showed that nearly 50 percent of New Yorkers believe this to be the case.

You see, one does not have to actively participate in a crime to be part of it. The employee who knowingly unlocks the rear door to a business is just as guilty as the burglars who loot the building later that night

This is called an inside job. It happens all the time in criminal activity.

At a minimum, 9/11 was criminal activity that officials at the highest level allowed to happen on purpose. Far worse, the evidence in the record provided here can lead to the conclusion that an element within the US government actually orchestrated the 9/11 attacks.

Whatever the case, the attacks of 9/11 were without doubt some of the most monstrous crimes in history. It is my hope that this book will motivate the American public to seek out and bring to justice the real perpetrators behind the horrors that chilled the world on September 11, 2001, and which have led to an aftermath that is putting the future freedom of America in jeopardy.

Jim Marrs