9/11 Was an Inside Job

The Story

At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, a hijacked airliner 'carrying some 10,000 gallons of jet fuel' flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. That is how the 9/11 Commission opened its report. At 9:03 a second plane hit the South Tower. At 9:37 a third struck the Pentagon. At 10:03 a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Both towers 'collapsed less than 90 minutes' after the first impact. The Commission counted more than 2,600 dead at the World Trade Center, 125 at the Pentagon and 256 on the four planes.

The Commission concluded that the attacks were carried out by '19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan,' meaning al Qaeda, the network led by Usama Bin Ladin. It traced their training, travel and money in detail, down to how they got through airport security: 'Their success rate in penetrating the system was 19 for 19.'

NIST 'found no corroborating evidence' that the towers 'were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.'

The government's failures were real, and the Commission said so plainly. It found 'failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management,' and missed chances to track future hijackers. It quoted the director of central intelligence on the summer of 2001: 'The system was blinking red.' Those failures, and later public anger over the Iraq War, became fertile ground for a more radical idea: that the attacks were not missed at all, but planned or allowed from within. The movement that grew around that idea called itself '9/11 Truth.'

Its strongest focus was physical. Believers said jet fuel cannot melt steel, so the towers must have been demolished. NIST, which spent years investigating the collapses, answered that the steel never needed to melt. 'In no instance did NIST report that steel in the WTC towers melted due to the fires,' it said. The plane impacts knocked fireproofing off the steel, and fires reaching about 1,000 degrees Celsius 'significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns.' That inward bowing started each collapse. NIST said it 'found no corroborating evidence' that the towers were 'brought down by controlled demolition using explosives.'

The hardest case was 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story office building that no plane hit, which fell at 5:20 that afternoon. Debris from the North Tower started fires inside it. Broken city water mains left its lower-floor sprinklers dry, and firefighters made no effort to fight those fires because there was no water. NIST concluded that heat made steel floor beams expand, pushing a girder off its connection to a critical column, Column 79, and setting off a progressive collapse. It called the event 'the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by uncontrolled fires.'

NIST also acknowledged something the movement had pointed out: for about 2.25 seconds, Building 7's north face 'descended essentially in free fall.' NIST said this happened because the exterior columns below had buckled, leaving 'negligible support from the structure below,' and that it was consistent with its model. It considered blast scenarios and 'concluded that blast events inside the building did not occur.'

The record shows a government that failed to stop an attack it had warning signs of. No official investigation has found that the government planned or carried it out.