April 6, 2006

Another Grassy Knoll?
Forum looks at 9/11 conspiracy theories

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

The investigation is over, the debris long ago cleared. But nearly five years after the destruction of New York’s twin towers, some people are still asking what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

Even for those who have never doubted that hijackers flew planes into the towers and the Pentagon, the questions that 9/11 authors Webster Tarpley and Barrie Zwicker raised Saturday in a lecture at the University of Washington are deeply disturbing:

How could a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon without leaving a trace of seats, luggage, or wings? What made the twin towers crumble? And why did an undamaged building at the World Trade Center seem to implode later that day?

Like a growing number of 9/11 “truth activists,” Tarpley and Zwicker say the answers go far beyond Osama bin Laden and 19 would-be hijackers. That’s one reason the two writers, who were presented by Seattle’s 9/11 Visibility Project, spent as much time talking about the psychology of denial as the unexplained facts of Sept 11.

They’re not alone. On March 20, actor Charlie Sheen raised the same questions on the Alex Jones radio show and said the tide is turning for an independent investigation.

The first thing to look at, the two authors said, is the collapse of World Trade Center’s Building 7. At 5:20 p.m., with only small fires burning on two floors, the 47-story structure collapsed in a demolition-like free fall. No plane ever hit the building.

Author Gerald Posner has argued that tanks of diesel fuel in the building caught fire. But, “Even if the whole building were covered in flaming diesel,” Zwicker said, “it would not bring down a steel-framed high-rise.”

“ To know about 9/11, you really only need to know about Building 7.”

Zwicker is a Canadian reporter and producer of “The Great Deception,” a 2002 TV series that was the first to question 9/11. He and Tarpley, author of “9/11 Synthetic Terror,” also said that the collapse of the twin towers can’t be explained by fire, the reason given in a report finalized last year by the government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Zwicker cited skyscrapers in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Caracas and Madrid that had survived raging fires on multiple floors. The twin towers, he added, were among the strongest structures ever built, with 47 gigantic vertical steel supports.

In November 2004, he said, Kevin Ryan, a site manager with Underwriter Laboratories, which certified the steel used at the World Trade Center, sent a letter to NIST refuting that jet-fuel flames caused the towers to collapse. Ryan, who was later fired, wrote that the 500-degree heat of the fires was far short of the nearly 3,000 degrees required to soften unfireproofed steel.

Zwicker and Tarpley assert the towers were prewired with explosives. As proof, they cited the eyewitness reports of explosions, the tons of pulverized concrete blown into the air, and the metal that remained at the site as molten liquid for weeks on end.

The authors also said there’s no evidence that Flight 77 actually hit the Pentagon. In a photograph taken just after the impact, Tarpley showed a ground-level entry point that he said was too small for the fuselage or engine of a Boeing 757 to have made.

“ A cruise missile is more likely,” he said.

The 19 hijackers, Tarpley said, were merely patsies in the world’s most brazen “foreign-flag operation” — an incident invented or pulled off by the military, such as Vietnam’s now-discredited Gulf of Tonkin attack, that’s used as a pretext for war.

Otherwise, Zwicker said,“you have to believe that 19 kamikaze hijackers” — one of whom couldn’t pass a Cessna flight test — “outwitted NORAD and the American Air Force” in some of the world’s most protected airspace.

“ You start talking about this, even with conservative Republicans,” Charlie Sheen told Alex Jones March 20, “and they can’t debate away some of the most obvious facts.” n

[Resources]

To learn more about 9/11 activism, go to www.911truth.org or www. septembereleventh.org.