Revealed OR Concealed?

Introduction

9/11 Revealed is impressively packaged. It has 253 pages with scores of color photographs, and sophisticated graphic design. The writing is dramatic. It has a broad scope, and appears to cover most of the challenges to the official story of the 9/11/01 attack.

The book pretends to speak for the 9/11 Truth Movement. It is written in the third person, and presents most challenges as things that "9/11 skeptics" or "Nine/Eleven skeptics" say. The undiscerning reader is likely to think that the book represents the work of the community of serious independent investigators working to expose the truth about the attack. Finding that the book fails to make a strong case that the attack was the work of insiders, the reader may conclude, incorrectly, that investigators have failed to make a compelling case.

In essence 9/11 Revealed is a slick package designed to sell the numerous hoaxes that have long been used to marginalize the 9/11 Truth Movement as nothing but a bunch of loony conspiracy theorists lacking the critical thinking skills necessary to correctly evaluate evidence.

Who would write such a book? Other books purporting to expose the attack as the work of insiders are also marred by errors, but the skillful way in which 9/11 Revealed embeds red herrings and hoaxes within a tapestry of seemingly professional reporting suggests an explanation other than incompetence.

This statement is obviously a reference to the statement by NORAD spokesman Maj. Douglas Martin, referenced here, that "From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001." The authors conflate scrambles (launching fighters) with interceptions (catching up to the aircraft in distress), which are two entirely different things.

In fact, the cores, like the perimeter walls, were 100% steel-framed, and the cores' footprints occupied 27 percent of the towers' footprints, not a majority.

Chapter 5 gives a wildly inaccurate description of the 1975 fire in the North Tower:

On 23 February 1975, the design had been put to the test: an intense fire that broke out on the 11th floor of the World Trade Center. The fire subsequently spread down to the 9th and up to the 19th floors, but this fire did not cause failure of the floor trusses (nor any other major structural feature).
[page 92]

In fact, the fire was confined primarily to the 11th floor, its spread to other floors apparently limited to cable shafts in the Tower's core. The book cites only an unnamed "news report at the time," though accurate reports from one and two days after the incident, such as from the New York Times, are easy to find.

One of the most successful and dishonest tactics employed by apologists for the official collapse theory is to accuse its detractors of mis-stating that theory. All variants of that theory endorsed by official reports blame heat-induced weakening -- not melting -- of the structural steel. By insinuating that all challenges to the theory are based on misinterpretations of it as blaming steel-melting-fires, attack pieces such as Popular Mechanics' and Scientific American's paint skeptics as ignorant or disingenuous. 9/11 Revealed gives such attacks fresh ammunition with the following statement.

... a laboratory director [Kevin Ryan] was fired in late 2004 after he wrote a letter to a NIST official challenging its melting steel explanation of the WTC towers' collapse. (AP 11/23/04).
[page 98]

Unlike 9/11 Revealed, Ryan did not equate the official explanation with the melting of steel.

This statement is not qualified as referring only to collapses due to fire. In fact, there have been thousands of cases of steel-framed high-rise buildings collapsed by earthquakes.

9/11 Revealed provides a mediocre run-down of the failure to scramble jets, disclosing many of the facts enumerated on our pages describing and analyzing the multiple failures in air defense. Poison pills like confusing scrambles with interceptions will allow the critical reader to dismiss any valid points made.

The book mentions only a single war game exercise: Vigilant Guardian. It makes no mention evidence of as many as four other exercises also coincidentally planned for the time-frame of 9/11/01. These are well documented on websites cited by the book, such as such as FromTheWilderness.com, and here on 911Research, from which the book apparently lifted so much material without credit.

• Operation Northern Vigilance: This apparently had the effect of removing air defense resources away from the northeast corridor into northwest Canada.
• Operation Vigilant Warrior: This may have been a counterpart for the exercise they mention, Vigilant Guardian.
• The National Reconnaissance Office Plane Crash Drill: This exercise, simulating a plane crashing into the NRO's headquarters, disabled one of the office's functions -- that of monitoring airborne objects -- while the attack unfolded.
• The Tripod II Biowarfare Exercise: This had the effect of deploying FEMA to Manhattan in advance of the attack.

By mentioning only one exercise, 9/11 Revealed makes the war game issue seem easily explainable as a coincidence.

This long-ago-debunked pod idea is the subject of 911Review.com's page ERROR: A Pod Was Attached to the South Tower Plane.

Look Ma, No Resolution

Page 82 reproduces three video frames which the authors assert show the "bulbous housing on the underside of the attacking plane" and "the pod". It reproduces a fourth photo at a fraction of the size with the caption: "this hazy grab taken from the east shows no pod below the fuselage," failing to note the extremely poor resolution of the frames they claim show the "pod."

This illustration on page 82 shows three grainy video frames -- two from the Fairbanks footage, and one likely Photoshopped -- to assert that the plane had a "pod".

• They fail to note Nicholas DeMasi's account of the recovery of three of the four black boxes at Ground Zero.
• They fail to mention reports of the identification of passenger remains at Ground Zero.
• They emphasize that authorities have not verified the identities of the crashed planes by documenting part numbers from plane wreckage, but fail to acknowledge that the same authorities have successfully resisted calls for the release of any shred of evidence from the crime, with only a few exceptions.

9/11 Revealed appears to be carefully crafted to conceal evidence of the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers. Most notably, it avoids disclosing any of the many features of the Towers' destruction that indicate controlled demolition. However, the authors don't stop at that. They contextualize the question of demolition as incidental to how the attack was engineered, and cast it as something that only experts can understand.

This theme pops up several other places in the book, as when they suggest on page 69 such a "safety measure" would be legitimate, and in an illustration in Chapter 5 with the following caption.

The fires in the Twin Towers posed a serious menace to the prestigious corporate properties that clustered around their feet, most of them banks with access to expensive litigators.
...
With the exception of some collateral damage in the immediate area, the collapse of the towers saved the corporate neighbors' properties from being hit by toppling towers, and the New York Port Authority from major liability suits.
[page 105]

The illustration does double duty: it underscores the idea of a legitimate explanation for rigging the Towers with explosives, and it asserts that fires could have toppled the Towers.

Avoiding the Visual Evidence

Despite having an abundance of color photographs, the book displays no images of the explosive destruction of the Twin Towers, save 3 small images of the South Tower less than two seconds into its destruction. This photograph shows the North Tower about 6.5 seconds into its destruction.

The entire book contains only three photographs showing the South Tower coming down, and none of the North Tower. All three images are small, and all show early moments of the event, before the explosiveness is fully evident.

Instead of disclosing the smoking-gun evidence indicating controlled demolition, the book leads the reader to believe that no such evidence exists.

The essential evidence needed to identify the cause of the collapse and intensity of the fire was lost.
[page 95]

The scores of photographs and videos of the Towers' destruction are hard physical evidence which can be used to prove the thesis of controlled demolition on the basis of quantitative measurements. The authors act as though these bodies of evidence don't exist, failing to even provide a reference to where the readers might find this visual evidence.

The portion of the book that questions the official explanation of the collapses of the Twin Towers as impact- and fire-induced consists of a few pages dominated by quotations of experts, some highly misleading. It notes the initial candid reaction and later retraction of Van Romero, but fails to report the rewards he received. It states that "the ongoing controversy flared up again" when Kevin Ryan was fired, as if no serious challenges to the official story were raised by anyone other than Ryan since Romero's initial statement.

The book's reliance on experts in questioning the WTC building collapses, combined with its avoidance of photographs of the Twin Towers exploding, reinforces the notion that the question of whether the buildings were demolished is beyond the grasp of ordinary people. 911Research argues that the opposite is true: that only common sense and high school physics are required to conclude that the the Towers did not self-destruct, but were systematically destroyed. This position is encapsulated in the title of Hoffman's interview Your Eyes Don't Lie: Common Sense, Physics, and the WTC Collapses .

The idea that WTC Building 6 was cratered by an explosion, debunked by 911Research starting in mid-2003, may have started as an innocent error. The impressive hole in Building 6 suggests an explosion to some people who fail to appreciate the kinetic energy and non-uniform distribution of thousands of tons of steel falling from the adjacent North Tower. However, a detailed review of the evidence from the attack, such as the continuous TV coverage, and the hundreds of oral histories, rules out the theory that the building suffered a giant explosion.

The idea that a rising cloud of dust shows such an explosion has long been conclusively debunked:

• The WTC 'Mystery Explosion' Video Hoax (on QuestionsQuestions.net)
• ERROR: Building 6 Explosion

Another example of the authors' setting up skeptics for attack by misrepresenting their challenges to the official theories is their trotting out of the melted steel straw man covered earlier.

Still another example is their attribution to "Nine/Eleven skeptics" a paper by an anonymous individual attacking a straw man.

Nine/Eleven skeptics have calculated that the entire 10,000 gallons of jet fuel from the aircraft, injected into one floor of the World Trade Center, and burned with perfect efficiency, would have raised the temperature of the floor to 536ºF (280ºC) at the most.
[page 92]

Aside from making the assumption that the heat was uniformly distributed throughout a floor, including the concrete slabs that would resist heating, the point of the paper is basically irrelevant because the official theories primarily blame the burning of office contents for elevating temperatures of steelwork, saying that the jet fuel fires acted mainly as an ignition source.

• Sounds of explosions at the outsets of the events
• Rapid onset of destruction and rapid descent of rubble
• Jets of dust shooting out of the building
• Totality of collapse leaving no large pieces of building intact
• Copious dust production from the fine pulverization of concrete

The fact that the destruction of the Twin Towers shares these characteristics with standard controlled demolitions creates a strong prima facie case for controlled demolition being the cause of their destruction. The few ways in which the Towers' destruction differs from standard demolitions actually makes the case for the Towers' demolition stronger:

• The more thorough extent of the Towers' destruction required more energy (more explosives) to achieve.
• The top-down sequence of the Towers' destruction required more energy, since there was less mass above the collapse zones to crush them.

The observation that the Towers' destruction showed many features unique to controlled demolitions has been promininently featured by this website -- one of the most visible of the sites challenging the official story -- and by renowned theologian David Ray Griffin. Morgan and Henshall, while pretending to question the official collapse theory, chose to devote not even one paragraph to this persuasive point, which goes to the heart of the crimes of 9/11/01.

The Pentagon "no-plane" hoax has been the most successful tool used to discredit the broad range of challenges to the official story. Hoffman commented on its use in his essay The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory: Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics. 9/11 Revealed devotes most of Chapter 6 to repeating a series of tired and fallacious arguments about the Pentagon attack that revolve around the no-jetliner theory.

Deceptive Use of Photographs

The book has no photos showing the extent of fires following the Pentagon crash, and states:

... assuming [the fireball] was an inefficient combustion, there should still have been hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of burning kerosene in front of the Pentagon, of which there is little sign.
[page 136]

In place of real photographs, 9/11 Revealed reproduces what is probably the single most effective piece of propaganda in service of of the no-jetliner theory -- a misleading graphic by "Silent but Deadly" that subtly reinforces people's misconceptions about the solidity of aircraft. Far from being stainless steel slugs as the "simulation" implies, aircraft such as jetliners are lightweight and fragile, skinned with aluminum less than 2 millimeters thick.

• ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left Only a Small Impact Hole
• ERROR: The Pentagon Attack Left No Aircraft Debris
• ERROR: Aircraft Crashes Always Leave Large Debris

The book misleadingly states that "the Pentagon released to the Associated Press" five frames from a Pentagon CCTV camera, when in fact they were leaked by an anonymous source. It briefly mentions that "some skeptics think they are completely faked," citing one of several clear signs of forgery. However, the page that reproduces three of the frames does not question their authenticity. The captions include the following:

The only explanation for this white smoke (apart from an air vortex) is that it is a rocket engine trail from a guided missile.

The missile conclusion is supported by evidence in the second image, ...
[page 140]

Given the lack of a credible source of the frames and the evidence they were edited, they don't support any conclusions about what attacked the Pentagon on 9/11/01. They do, however, provide evidence of a campaign to distract skeptics into pursuing red herrings.

9/11 Revealed uses a common deception to assert that engine parts photographed at the Pentagon do not match those of a 757, by showing a photograph of an intact engine in which only the fan is visible, implying that all the engine rotors have the same diameter as the fan. In fact, the high-pressure compressor and turbine rotors in such an engine match the one in the photo, as explained in 911Review.com's page ERROR: Engine Parts From the Pentagon Crash Don't Match a 757.

Pentagon Eyewitnesses: The Standard Misrepresentations

The Pentagon no-jetliner theories are contradicted by an extensive body of eyewitness accounts. 9/11 Revealed, like many proponents of no-jetliner theories, minimizes this body of evidence by thoroughly misrepresenting it. It states:

Those who confirm the official story are in the majority, but many are quoted indirectly or in short snatches, and it is not clear that they positively identify a passenger jet.
[page 143]

Compare this statement with this analysis of the eyewitness statements.

The authors employ one of the most common techniques used to misrepresent and discredit the eyewitnesses: cherry-picking accounts and excerpts of accounts while hiding the larger body of evidence. It quotes Lon Raines saying "I was convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast it sounded nothing like an airplane." But it fails to note that neither he nor any other witness reported seeing a missile, or that few people have heard a jetliner flying a few feet overhead at 400 mph. More important, it fails to acknowledge the number of accounts that specifically refer to sighting a jetliner consistent with a Boeing 757 and American Airlines Flight 77.

Dishonestly, the authors quote Mike Walter saying that it "was like a cruise missile with wings" (on page 144), while ignoring the context of his statement, which is obvious from the full quotation:

I looked out my window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming. And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.

A Critical Omission

The book provides considerable detail on the location of the Pentagon strike. However, it omits any mention that the attack was, in effect, a surgical strike whose victims inside the building were mostly employees of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). This is a vital point, because it suggests a possible motive of the Pentagon attack: to eliminate a team of investigative experts who were not part of the inside job.

• It makes no mention of the fact that the 9/11 Commission insisted that Flight 93 crashed at 10:03, instead of 10:06 -- the crash time indicated by all credible evidence.
• It makes no mention of eyewitness accounts that the plane was struck in the air.
• It mis-characterizes the far-flung debris field, with the following error:

the one-ton engine part lying 1.2 miles from the crash site.
[page 156]

Press reports described the engine part as being 200 yards or "more than 1/2 mile" from the primary debris field. By radically mis-stating the one piece of shoot-down evidence it discloses, the book discredits the point.

For some background on the idea that Flight 93 didn't crash in Shanksville, see the Flight 93 Crash Debris section of Hoffman's recent essay on Morgan Reynolds.

One irrefutable smoking gun showing the fraudulence of the official story is the "confession video" released by the Pentagon on December 13, 2001 to "prove" that Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. In the video, a man we were told is bin Laden supposedly claims responsibility for the attack. However, a comparison of this video to earlier videos of bin Laden shows that the confessor in the video cannot be bin Laden because he has a different facial structure.

9/11 Revealed buries this smoking gun by mislabeling images of bin laden and his impostors. Page 161 reproduces three images alleged to be of bin Laden, one from an early 2001 al Jazeera video showing the real bin Laden (left), one from the confession video (middle), and one from a video run days before the 2004 US election (right). Both the confession and US election videos show men with noses much squatter than the real bin Laden's. However, the book switches the labels for the 2004 US election video and the 2001 al Jazeera video. The result is that the odd man out becomes the one labeled 2004 US ELECTION, subtly telling the reader that the man labeled DEC 2001 (the confessor) is the real bin Laden, since he more closely matches the man labeled 2001.

A suspiciously large amount of material in the book appears to have been taken from the 9-11 Research website without crediting it. In several cases 9/11 Revealed contains specific language and numbers uniquely reported by 911Research. Yet the the book does not credit 911Research, nor its companion websites 911Review.com or WTC7.net, except to malign it.

911Research as FEMA Co-Conspirator

The book's only mention of 911Research is the crediting of 911Research.com (the backup mirror for the primary site, 911Research.wtc7.net) in the credit for an image showing an engine piece near Ground Zero. As the following scan from the book shows, that image sits next to a photo from FEMA's WTC Building Performance Study.

The illustration is situated in a span of about eight pages whose apparent purpose is to undermine the accounts of Flights 11 and 175 crashing into the Twin Towers. Insinuating that FEMA covered up the crashes of different aircraft by destroying and planting evidence, the authors imply that 911Research is part of the cover-up.

Credit for the image of the jetliner engine part actually belongs to the Naudet Brothers, since the frame is extracted from their documentary.

Gold Heist Story Heist

One of the more egregious examples of the book's appropriation without credit of 911Research's reporting is its paragraph covering the discrepancy between the value of precious metals reportedly stored under the World Trade Center and the value reported recovered after the attack.

9/11 Revealed copies this image, along with the gist of 911Research's original reporting, without crediting 911Research.

Some $230 million worth of gold was discovered in a lorry in a tunnel under the Center in November 2001. ²¹ We have seen no reports of other caches being found. However, Comex was reported to have at least $950 million worth of gold stored in its vault under the Center, and the fate of that haul remains unknown. ²²
[page 107]

21 "Below Ground Zero, Silver and Gold", New York Times, 1 November 2001
22 National Real Estate Investor, 19 November 2001
[page 240]

Compare this excerpt to the page Missing Gold, which has existed in its current form on 911Research since late 2003. The two references cited by 9/11 Revealed for this story are References 1 and 4 from our page. The $950 million figure comes from 911Research, not from reference 22.

Immediately before its plagiarism of 911Research's report of the missing gold, 9/11 Revealed copies most of the passage excerpted from Salon.com on this page.

9/11 Revealed's description of NIST's investigation appears to have been copied almost verbatim from 911Research, again without credit. Compare its excerpts (with line breaks added) to excerpts from 911Research's page on NIST as of April 4, 2005 (about four months before 9/11 Revealed was published).

Although it was funded with a budget of $30 million

it worked on the premise of the official story, namely, that the collapses of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 resulted from the impacts of scheduled airliners.

In its 7 May 2003 news release on the progress of its investigation, it seemed clear that the agency had been hampered in its investigation by a lack of access to evidence.
[page 97]

NIST's investigation ... was funded with a budget of $30 million.
...
its investigation is being conducted strictly within the confines of the official story -- that the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7 resulted from the jetliner impacts.
...
In its May 7, 2003 News Release on the progress of its investigation, there is clear evidence that the agency has been hampered in its investigation by a lack of access to evidence.

The book does not provide any references for its two paragraphs on NIST. The previous paragraph, about FEMA, also borrows language from 911Research's NIST page.

FEMA eventually allocated a mere $600,000 to fund the only investigation of the building collapses that functioned before the site had been mopped up.

This contrasts with the $600,000 allocated by FEMA to fund the only investigation of the building collapses that functioned before the site had been mopped up.

Brazen Hypocrisy

The page facing 9/11 Revealed's copyright page is graced with one of the most dramatic images from the attack: a photograph taken from within 1000 feet from the South Tower's base about two seconds into the Tower's explosive destruction.

The image is not credited. The same image is reproduced on page 88 with a caption ending in "Copyright: Amy Sancetta". In fact, the photograph was taken by Gulnara Samoilova. The authors do not credit Samoilova anywhere in their book. Samoilova risked her life to take the photograph and was exposed to the toxic dust cloud that reached her position within fifteen seconds. Given the composition of the dust cloud, which was up to four percent asbestos, Samoilova qualifies a one of the victims described in the dedication. Yet the book avoids the subject of the health and environmental catastrophe produced by the Towers' destruction, and lacks even the most cursory treatment of the human cost of the attack.

The hypocrisy of the dedication is that the two groups it mentions -- victims of the events of 11 September 2001 and activists of the 9/11 Truth Movement -- are the two groups most maligned by the book's plagiarism, omissions, misdirection, and hoax-mongering.

This list sandwiches three serious 9/11 truth websites between two that feature hoaxes. Physics911.org promotes science fiction like Operation Pearl, the Pentagon no-jetliner-crash theory, and a long list of hoax websites. 911visibility.org, though once active, is no longer maintained. "Global research" is apparently a reference to the website GlobalResearch.ca, the authors chose not to name directly. This omission will vastly reduce the number of the book's readers who go on to visit the Global Research site, since ".ca" is not a domain suffix familiar to most Americans.

By including 911Truth.org -- a website that represents a variety of mainstream views among the 9/11 Truth Movement, the authors reinforce the impression that they are speaking for the Movement. However, one will be hard-pressed to find any advocacy of the many hoaxes promoted in this book on the pages of 911Truth.org, GlobalResearch.ca, or 911visibility.org. In contrast to these sites, 911Dossier.co.uk -- a site associated with author Henshall -- promotes many of the nonsensical theories advanced in the book.