Talk:Loose Change (film)/claims

Claims and points which are still to be addressed, answered or debunked:

(some are textual quotes, some may have been reorganized for presentation's sake)

Note: all of the claims below are examined in this document Loose Change 2nd Edition Viewer Guide

Timeline

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center."
- National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

There were pre-9/11/01 NORAD drills using scenarios of jetliners crashing into the Towers.

• June 2000. The Department of Justice releases a terrorism manual, with the World Trade Center in crosshairs.

• September, 2000. The Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank whose members include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, releases their report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses." In it, they declare that:

"the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

• June, 2001. The Department of Defense initiates new instructions for military intervention in the case of a hijacking. It states that for all non-immediate responses, the Department of Defense must get permission directly from the Secretary of Defense.

• July 4th, 2001. Osama Bin Laden, wanted by the United States since 1998, receives medical attention at the American Hospital in Dubai, where he is visited by a local chief of the CIA.

• July 24th, 2001. Larry A. Silverstein, who already owned World Trade Center 7, signs a 3.2 billion dollar, 99-year lease on the entire World Trade Center complex, six weeks before 9-11. Included in the lease is a 3.5 billion dollar insurance policy specifically covering acts of terrorism.

• September 6th, 2001. 3,150 put options are placed on United Airlines' stock. A put option is a bet that a stock will fall. That day, put options were more than 4 times its daily average.

• Bomb sniffing dogs are pulled from the World Trade Center, and security guards end two-weeks of 12 hour shifts.

• September 7th, 2001. 27,294 put options are placed on Boeing's stock, more than 5 times the daily average.

• September 8th, 2001. The put/call ratios for United Airlines surged to 25 times the daily average.

• September 10th, 2001. 4,516 put options are placed on American Airlines, almost 11 times its daily average.

• September 10th, 2001. Newsweek Newsweek journalists Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball report that a number of top Pentagon brass cancel their flight plans for the next morning.

• September 10th, 2001. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown receives a phone call eight hours prior to the attacks warning him not to fly the next morning. Pacifica Radio later reveals that this phone call came directly from National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice.

• September 10th, 2001. In Pakistan, at a military hospital, all of the urologists are replaced by a special team, in order to host their guest of honor, Osama Bin Laden, Who is carefully escorted inside to "be watched carefully and looked after."

Pentagon 9/11

• Hani Hanjour, a man who had trouble controlling and landing a one-engine Cessna 172, allegedly executes a 330-degree turn at 530 miles per hour, descending 7000 feet in two and a half minutes to crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the ground floor of the Pentagon. This would be impossible even for an experienced pilot since this kind of plane would go into a high speed stall.

• If flight 77 bounced off the lawn before impact, why wasn't there any visible evidence of such?

• If the fire was hot enough to incinerate a 757 jet, then how come investigators were able to find 184 of 189 found at the Pentagon?

• Surveillance from a gas station, the Sheraton Hotel, and the Virginia Department of Transportation captured the entire thing. However the FBI was there within minutes to confiscate the tapes, including a warning to the employees not to discuss what they had seen. If the government wants to prove once and for all that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon all they would have to do is release one of those tapes. Instead, they released 5 frames from a camera across the heliport, even though none of them show a 757.

• Is it merely a coincidence that the Pentagon was hit in the only section that was renovated to withstand that very same kind of attack, and the Donald Rumsfeld was safe in his office on the opposite end of the building?

World Trade Center

• Teresa Veliz, working on the 47th floor of the North Tower when Flight 11 hit, reports that

"I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel puching detonator buttons. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know where to run."

• 9:59. New York City, New York. The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapses to the ground in approximately 10 seconds. 29 minutes later the North Tower follows suit, collapsing in approximately 10 seconds.

• Later that evening at 5:20, World Trace Center 7, a 47 story office building 300 feet away from the North Tower, suddenly collapses. The building's tenants included the CIA, Department of Defense, IRS, Secret Service, and Rudy Giuliani's emergency bunker. And the S.E.C. was using it to store 3 to 4 thousand files related to numerous Wall Street investigations. Although every single building surrounding Building 7 stood intact, it fell straight down, into a convenient little pile, in 6 seconds showing all the features of a controlled demolition.

• On May 4th, 1988, a 62 story skyscraper in Los Angeles burned for 3 hours and spread over 4 floors. It did not collapse. On February 23rd, 1991, a 38 story skyscraper in Philadelphia, built in 1973, burned for more than 19 hours and spread over 8 floors. It did not collapse. On October 17th, 2004, a 56 story skyscraper in Venezuela, built in 1976, burned for over 17 hours and spread over 26 floors, eventually reaching the roof. Guess what? It did not collapse. All of these were more severe and long-lasting. Apparently none of these buildings suffered serious structural damage from the fires, and all were rehabilitated.

• The second plane hits the South Tower between the 78th and 82nd floors at 9:03 AM, barely hitting the southeast corner, the majority of the jet fuel exploding outside in a massive fireball. Yet, this Tower collapses first, even though the North Tower was hit straight on, and had already been burning for 18 minutes longer.

• Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies calculates the time in which an object will travel a certain distance in complete freefall. Distance, D, equals 16.08 times Time in seconds squared. DISTANCE = 16.08 X SECONDS SQUARED. The South Tower was 1362 feet tall. 1362 equals 16.08 times 84.7. Or, 9.2 seconds. The Twin Towers came down in nearly freefall speed. Since a steel structure should have provided hundreds, if not thousands, of times the resistance of air, it must have been demolished ahead of the falling mass.

• 200,000 tons of steel shatters into sections no longer than a couple feet long.

• 425,000 cubic yards of concrete is pulverized into dust.

• Van Romero, Vice President for Research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology stated:

"My opinion is, based on the videotapes, after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center, there were some explosive devices inside that caused the towers to collapse. The collapses were too methodical to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures."

Ten days later:

"Certainly the fire is what caused the building to fail."

Why would Romero change his mind so suddenly? News stories about New Mexico Tech since 2001 suggest there were ample motives for Romero's change of heart.

• Hyman Brown. Civil Engineering Professor and the World Trade Center's construction manager states:

"It was over-designed to withstand almost anything including hurricanes, high winds, bombings and an airplane hitting it ... although the buildings were designed to withstand a 150-year storm and the impact of a Boeing 707, jet fuel burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit weakened the steel."

Note: A Boeing 707 is roughly the same size as a 767.

• Kevin Ryan. Underwriters Laboratories, the company that certified the steel that was used in the World Trade Center, In a letter to Frank Gayle of the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

"The results of your recently published metallurgical tests seem to clear things up, and support your team's August 2003 update as detailed by the Associated Press, in which you were ready to "rule out weak steel as a contributing factor in the collapse". The evaluation of paint deformation and spheroidization seem very straightforward, and you noted that the samples available were adequate for the investigation. Your comments suggest that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500F (250C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.
However the summary of the new NIST report seems to ignore your findings, as it suggests that these low temperatures caused exposed bits of the building's steel core to "soften and buckle". Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that "most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250C". To soften steel for the purposes of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1100C. However, this new summary report suggests that much lower temperatures were able to not only soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse."

Ryan's statements directly contradict statements from so-called "experts", which claim that 2000 degree heat inside the WTC caused the towers to collapse. Days after writing this letter, Kevin Ryan was fired from his position.

• Not even the experts agree with each other. So what else could have caused the Twin Towers and Building 7 to collapse?

[Peter Jennings]: 10 o'clock Eastern time this morning just collapsing on itself.
[Reporter]: The second building that was hit by the plane has just completely collapsed.
[Peter Jennings]: We have no idea what caused this.
[CNN anchor]: Almost looks like one of those planned implosions.
[Chanell 8 Voiceover]: As if a demolition team set off, when you see the whole demolitions of whole buildings. It folded down on itself and it was not there anymore.
[Peter Jennings]: If you wish to bring anybody who's ever watched a building being demolished on purpose knows, that if you're going to do this, you have to get at the under infrastructure of a building and bring it down.
[Female witness]: We heard another explosion and I'm assuming that's the one that came from the lower level. Since there were two... They were 18 minutes apart. Well... this is, no the first, the first explosion and there was the second explosion in the same building. There were 2 explosions.
[WCBS 2 Voiceover]: Federal Agencies that were down there do believe that there was some sort of explosive device, somewhere else besides the planes hitting.

• On 9-11, New York City lost 343 firefighters at the World Trade Center. Since they were the ones inside the Towers before and as they collapsed, I'd say they've got a pretty good grasp on what happened. So, what does the FDNY think? First, we have this interview from the Naudet brothers' documentary.

"... What do we do? We made it outside, we made it about a block? We made it at least 2 blocks and we started running ... Boom-boom-boom-boom. Floor by floor it started popping out. It was like, as if they had detonated ... Yeah, detonated. Take out the building. Boom-boom-boom-boom. ... all the way down, I was watching it and running. And then you just saw this cloud of s___ chasing you down. Couldn't outrun it."

• Firefighter Louie Cacchioli told People Weekly:

"I was taking firefighters up in the elevator to the 24th floor to get in position to evacuate workers. On the last trip up a bomb went off. We think there were bombs set in the building."

• For more than a year, the Port Authority blocked the release of a tape of firefighters' transmissions from the World Trade Center on 9-11. In November 2002, the tape was finally released to the New York Times and other news outlets. Why did it take so long to get the tape released?

"I got, uh, an eyewitness who said there was an explosion on floors 7 and 8, 7, 8. ; Battalion 3 to Dispatch, we've just had another explosion. ; ... Warren Street, because of the secondary explosion. We've got numerous people covered with dust from the secondary explosion. ; We got another explosion on the Tower, 10-13, 10-13. ; Tower 2 has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. ; I was involved in the secondary, uh, explosion at Tower 1, Kay... "

Chief Palmer had reached the fire on the 78th floor of the South Tower and devised a plan to put it out. 9:52 a.m., 13 minutes before collapse.

"... Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones."

If the 78th floor was a raging inferno like the government would have us believe, then Palmer wouldn't have gotten as far as he did and certainly wouldn't be able to put it out.

• On August 12th, 2005 an additional 15 hours of radio transmissions and transcripts of interviews with firefighters was finally released to the public. Firefighters describe two events consistent with the controlled demolition: bright flashes from inside the building ... And a number of crackling sounds before the buildings collapsed ...

• The discovery of basement-level hot spots of molten steel discovered more than a month after the collapse which the authors present as one of the possible reasons for the building's collapse.

• In all the videos of the collapses, explosions can be seen bursting from the buildings 20 to 30 storys below the demolition wave. Critics have tried explain this been caused by pancaking floors squeezing out air and dust, but no explanation as to why that can happen 10 to 20 floors below the exploding rubble cloud inside of which the tower is disintegrating as well as other incongruences.

• You're probably asking, if there were bombs in the building, how would they get in there without anyone noticing? Ben Fountain, a financial analyst who worked in the World Trade Center, told People Magazine that in the weeks before 9-11,

There were a number of unannounced and unusual drills where sections of both the Twin Towers and building 7 were evacuated for 'security reasons'.

Daria Coard, a guard in the North Tower, told Newsday that security detail was working 12 hour shifts for two weeks before 9-11, but on Thursday the 6th, bomb sniffing dogs were abruptly removed from the building.

• So who authorized all this? President Bush's brother, Marvin, was Board of Directors at Securacom from 1993 until fiscal year 2000. Securacom, now known as Stratesec, is an electronic security company backed by Kuwait-American Corporation, which provided security for United Airlines, Dulles International Airport, and from the early 1990s up to the day of 9-11, the World Trade Center. Marvin is also the former director of HCC Insurance Holdings which insured parts of the World Trade Center on 9/11. More information on this was supposed to be disclosed and never was. To date the SEC has not revealed what they have learned.

• If only we could examine the debris from the World Trade Center and figure out what happened. Unfortunately, Mayor Giuliani began shipping the remains off to recycling yards overseas before investigators could even examine it.

Much of the steel had been removed before FEMA's volunteer team of investigators had started its work. The plan to recycle the steel, submitted by Controlled Demolition Inc., was accepted by the city just 11 days after the attack, and the destruction of the steel proceeded over the objections of victims' families and fire safety experts.

• Not even FEMA was allowed into Ground Zero. Essentially, they blocked off a crime scene and destroyed all the evidence. - The team assembled by FEMA to study the 'collapses' -- the Building Performance Assessment Team -- lacked the authority and resources normally given to investigators, such as access to the crime scene, subpoena power, and adequate funding.

• Guess who was allowed into the site? Controlled Demolition, who was also responsible for cleaning up after the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

After the incident in Oklahoma, explosives expert General Parton proved that the truck bomb alone could not have produced the damage to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. His proofs were ignored. Meanwhile the evidence was buried. Controlled Demolition, was the company contracted to bury the remains of the Murrah Building, preventing proper forensic examination.

Aftermath

• "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every [attack]. I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons. I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations,"
  - Osama bin Laden, from a statement issued to Al Jazeera within days of the 9-11 attacks.

• Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, told CBS News that

"It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back. I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders."

Turns out Ted's right. Nicholas Demasi, a firefighter who helped the recovery efforts claims in the book Behind the Scenes: Ground Zero,

"At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site. To search for the black boxes from the planes. There were a total of four black boxes. We found three."

• FBI Director Robert Mueller said Flight 77's data recorder provided altitude, speed, headings and other information, but the voice recorder contained nothing useful. And Donald Rumsfeld said the data on the cockpit voice recorder was unrecoverable.

As for Flight 93, it was the only flight where the cockpit voice recorder was recovered. It was played for the families in April, 2002, but not before they signed an agreement saying that they wouldn't talk about it. They couldn't even take notes. The last three minutes of the tape was unaccounted for. The FBI had no explanation for the discrepancy. Why would the 9-11 Commission tell us Flight 11 and 175's recorders weren't found? Why would Robert Mueller tell us that there's nothing interesting on Flight 77s? What's on the last three minutes of Flight 93's cockpit voice recorder?

• The Terrorists - How many hijackers turned up alive?

On September 14th, 2001, the Department of Justice released the names of the alleged 19 hijackers. But on September 23rd, the BBC reported that Waleed Al Shehri was alive and well in Casablanca, Morrocco.

They also tracked down Abdulaziz Alomari, who is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and lost his passport while studying in Denver.

Wail M. Alshehri is alive and well.

"...is a pilot whose father is a Saudi diplomat in Bombay. "I personally talked to both father and son today.""
- Gaafar Allagany, Saudi Arabian Embassy, LA Times, 9/21/2001

Mohand Alshehri is alive in Saudi Arabia.

"According to the Orlando Sentinel, the Saudi Arabian embasy confirmed that ... Mohand Alshehri ... [is] not dead and had nothing to do with [9-11]."
- American Free Press, 10/12/2001

Khalid Almihdhar is a computer programmer in Mecca.

"I want to think all of this is a mistake." Almihdhar was watching TV at home when friends saw his photograph on the news and began to call to see if he was still alive."
- Chicago Tribune, 10/04/2001

Salem Alhazmi works at a chemical plant in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia.

"Salem Al-Hazmi is alive and ... not one of the people whoe perished in [Flight 77]. His passport had been stolen by a pickpocket in Cairo three years ago."
- The Guardian, 9/21/2001

Saeed Alghamdi is training to be a pilot in Tunis.

"The FBI provided no evidence of my involvement in the attacks. You can't imagine what it is like to be described as a [dead terrorist] when you are innocent and alive."
- The Telegraph, 9/23/2001

Ahmed Alnami is an administrative supervisor for Saudi Airlines.

""I'm still alive, I had never even heard of Pennsylvania." He never lost his passport and found it very worrying that his identity appeared to have been stolen."
- The Telegraph, 9/23/2001

Last but not least, Mohammed Atta's father claimed to receive a phone call from his son on September 12th.

On September 20th and 27th, Mueller admitted on CNN that there is "no legal proof to prove the identities of the hijackers".

• If there's no proof that the hijackers were members of al Qaeda, or if they were even on the planes in the first place, what justification do the USA have for bombing Afghanistan? The Bin Laden confession tape.

On December 14th, 2001, the government released a tape, allegedly of bin Laden confessing to the attacks of 9-11, which they claimed to find in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. There's a number of things wrong with this tape. One, the tape itself is of very poor quality. And two, the man in the video looks and acts nothing like Bin Laden. According to the FBI's website, Osama is left-handed. Yet, in this video, he is writing a note with his right hand. Not to mention he's wearing a gold ring, which is forbidden by Islamic law, and is never mentioned in the FBI's description of him. Comparing the video to four other pictures of bin Laden, the authors show no similarity between the «Osamas».

• Larry Silverstein, the man who purchased the World Trade Center in July, 2001. After September 11th, Silverstein demanded $7.2 billion dollars from his insurers, claiming that each plane counted as a separate act of terrorism. However, on December 6th, 2004, the courts only rewarded him with 2.2 billion dollars.

Note the $2.2 billion awarded in 2004 was in addition to awards Silverstein had already received.

• The put options that were placed on United Airlines, American Airlines, and Boeing. According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, more than 2.5 Million dollars has remained unclaimed.

• As for 9-11 itself, Reuters reported that Convar, a German computer company is responsible for helping companies and accountants in New York restore their data from over 400 hard drives that were recovered from the World Trade Center's rubble. Convar recovered information from 32 different computers that suggested insider trading took place on 9-11. Richard Wagner, an expert at Convar:

"There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding 100 million dollars. They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed."

After their analysis, Convar handed the results over to the FBI. Although the FBI was legally bound to investigate who was responsible, to date they have done no such thing.

• After September 11th, President Bush had and continues to have permission to do and say whatever he wants, all under the pretext of 9-11.

• The Patriot Act.
• The Department of Homeland Security.:
• Afghanistan.
• Iraq.