Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The trumpet call followed those seventy-one minutes which began at 8:46 A.M. on September 11, 2001, in the blue sky over New York. That was the moment when American Flight 11 gouged into the North Tower, and ended at 9:57 A.M. when the doomed passengers on United Flight 93 tried, but failed, to regain control over their plane before it crashed into the Pennsylvania soil. After 9/11 the calumny took root, nurtured by the new freedom of the Internet and ironically supported by the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld: “We know what we know; we know there are things we do not know; and there are things we know we know we don’t know.” That classic Rumsfeldism—which had actually referred to the need for a regime change in Iraq—was seized upon by the extremists as proof America had something to hide over 9/11.

The official 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence that office equipment in the towers had been “pulverized down to the last computer microchip.” Lee Hamilton, the former vice chairman of the Commission, felt compelled to say (to the author): “A lot of people I have encountered believe the U.S. government was involved. Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course the evidence does not lead that way at all.”

So why is it that many millions of people in the United States and Europe continue to embrace the accusation of a vast conspiracy? Is it possible—as a Mossad psychologist told the author—that what he called “the reality of terror” had become “dulled by the constant replaying of the television images so people saw it subconsciously as another kind of computer-generated game?”

The apologists for al-Qaeda filled the airwaves across the Arab world with claims that the 9/11 attacks had been a gigantic conspiracy by the Bush administration as an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2006, five years after they had first surfaced while smoke from the Twin Towers rose from the world’s largest funeral pyre, those claims had been given a new legitimacy. Seventy-five American academics, who called themselves Scholars For Truth, claimed things were not as officially presented. Some go so for as to speculate that a shadowy group of neo-conservatives, many of them embedded in the Bush administration, knew of the attack in advance and conspired with the CIA to topple the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the hope such unprecedented attacks would gain overwhelming support for a U.S.-led war in the Middle East. The last time such an attack had aroused the collective fury of Americans had been Pearl Harbor, when Japan had launched its assault on the U.S. fleet. The decision to do this had been to give Tokyo a clear geopolitical advantage in the Pacific and paved the way for an attack on the United States. That dream had finally died in the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, sixty-one years later, the Scholars For Truth—professors, lecturers, and academics of all kinds—claimed the decision to secretly launch 9/11 was also rooted in geopolitics, its objective to give the Bush administration control over the oil fields of Iraq.

A founder and leader of the group, Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah has said: “There is the clear possibility of thermite-based arson and demolition. The planes seen crashing into the Twin Towers were just a distraction. We don’t believe that nineteen hijackers and a few others in a cave with bin Laden pulled this off acting alone. We challenge this official theory and, by God, we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

His case, presented with all the scholarly language of academia, has given some credence to the hundreds of books and tens of thousands of Web pages devoted to 9/11 that argue the Bush administration had encouraged the attacks. Central to the argument is Professor Jones’s thesis that there is no official explanation for the speed with which the Twin Towers collapsed; each had taken 10 seconds for the 1,400-foot towers to topple; the other building in the complex, a 47-story structure, had taken only 7 seconds to do so, of that there is no dispute. But for the Scholars For Truth this was a phenomenon that contravened “the physical law of conservation of momentum and offers no credible explanation of how the towers fell at near terminal velocity into their own footprint. For some reason ninety percent of the building material was converted into ‘flour,’ creating a massive volume of sub-one-hundred-fifty-micron dust across southern Manhattan. By comparison with the destruction of other high-rise buildings, which have also spontaneously collapsed, either through mudslides or earthquakes, they fell to the side, largely intact or reduced to only large pieces of rubble and minimal dust amounts. The physical energy required to collapse the World Trade Center buildings and pulverize all office contents including computer chips to their basic elements clearly indicates a quantity of energy far beyond the gravitational energy potential of each tower; this is further evidence that the weight of a tower is insufficient to produce the energy required to pulverize its contents to such an extent.”

A poll conducted by Ohio University revealed that one-third of the American public believed the federal government assisted in the World Trade Center attacks or took no action to stop them. The poll offered one clue as to why millions accepted this. The pollsters found that the people most likely to believe “are those who regularly use the Internet but who do not regularly read, watch, or listen to ‘mainstream’ media. Alone before a computer, linked to their cyber friends as their only company, they can easily begin to accept all sorts of bizarre notions, especially when trying to make sense of an event as grotesque as the collapse of two skyscrapers,” reported the London Daily Telegraph , two days after the fifth anniversary.

So who is Professor Jones, who many see as an exposer of what would be undoubtedly the world’s greatest conspiracy—one that left the news that Princess Diana’s inquest was to open in January 2007 as little more than a passing footnote? The soft-spoken professor is the same man who is also convinced that Jesus wandered through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers and has published “evidence that the Mayans are well aware of the resurrected Lord” centuries before the Spanish priests brought them the good news. Professor Jones has also, for the past ten years, promoted in Third World countries a solar funnel cooker based on the highly disputed scientific theory of cold fusion. But despite this colorful background for a physics professor, Professor Jones has gathered like-minded academics to support his claim of a 9/11 conspiracy. However, in checking the author found that many of the Scholars For Truth are not scientists with proven expertise in relevant fields like aviation, air defense, air traffic control, civil engineering, firefighting, metallurgy, and geology—all essential skills to come to an informed conclusion about how the Twin Towers were felled. Many are academics who have devoted a great deal of their careers tilting at various windmills. Professor James H. Fetzer, who teaches in Minnesota and is head of a splinter group, is convinced that President John F. Kennedy was killed by several shooters and that the moon landing in 1969 was likely a hoax. More recently he has been quoted as urging that Americans “arm themselves and lend support to a military coup that will replace the Bush government with a new regime.”

Just as the Holocaust has increasingly attracted its deniers, so the tragedy of 9/11 is indeed so shocking and incomprehensible that it has attracted a growing number of people to reject the simple truth: that al-Qaeda had announced its coming, weeks before—and that the clear warnings from Mossad had been largely discounted. In Tel Aviv a senior Mossad analyst told the author in September 2006: