The government narrative on 9/11 says that the Boeing 757 Flight UA93 crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers fought the hijackers, preventing the aircraft from colliding with the White House or Camp David. But in the images of the impact site released on the same day, it is impossible to distinguish any wreckage of an airliner; even the reporters who’d rushed to the scene were perplexed. Jon Meyer of WJAC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, declared: “I was able to get right up to the edge of the crater. […] All I saw was a crater filled with small, charred plane parts. Nothing that would even tell you that is was the plane. […] There were no suitcases, no recognizable plane parts, no body parts”. The mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, the first on the scene with her sister and a friend, declared in March 2003: “Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been that a plane had crashed. But there was no plane. […] Nothing. Only this hole”.



The Boeing 757 Flight AA77 that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon also could not be found. French journalist Thierry Meyssan was the first to draw conclusions in 9/11: The Big Lie, a dissenting investigation published in March 2002 based on the pictures from the Department of Defense and The Associated Press. The lawn before the crash site was immaculate, the two or three pieces of debris that could be seen were ridiculously small, and certainly could not be identified as belonging to a Boeing. The reporter Jamie McIntyre of CNN, who arrived at the Pentagon an hour after the crash, was perplexed: “From my close-up inspection, there is no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. […] the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon”. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski of the U.S. Air Force, who was on the scene within minutes after the impact, reported: “I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact — no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. [...] all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident”.



Was the plane buried deep into the building? No photo taken inside the crash site shows even the slightest credible scrap of a plane, and witnesses say that they did not see anything that would suggest an airplane. April Gallop was in her office with her son of two months, 10 or 15 meters from the impact zone. She felt an explosion, and then the ceiling fell in on her; in making her way towards the exit with her child, she saw nothing that made her think that a plane had crashed, “no wreckage, no airplane fragments, no engines, no seats, no luggage, no fuselage sections with rows of windows, and especially, no blazing quantities of burning jet fuel”. In his documentary In Plane Site (2007), David von Kleist, follows after Thierry Meyssan in concluding that no plane crashed into the Pentagon. To those who then ask: “Well, if the plane didn't hit the Pentagon, where did it go?” he asks in return: “if Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, then where is it?” Did the plane just vanish? Did the fire, hardly noticeable in the photos, melt a hundred tons of metal, as was suggested by the government? If that were in fact the case, how did they manage to identify all the passengers through their fingerprint and DNA analysis, as has been claimed?



The recordings of 85 video cameras, either placed at the Pentagon or in the general vicinity, were seized by government agents, but no recognizable image of the aircraft was produced. Only one sequence was made public by court order in May 2006, and it includes four images that show an object exploding as it hits the Pentagon, but they do little to suggest that it is an airplane that caused the blast. Curiously, the film is dated September 12, not 11. According to some experts, the yellow light emitted by the explosion in the images could not have been caused by airplane fuel, and some Pentagon employees have reported that the impact site has an odor consistent with the scent of cordite (an explosive made from nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose).



Professional pilots united around Rob Balsamo as part of Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed the trajectory of Flight AA77 provided by the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) and demonstrated that it was physically impossible for a Boeing airliner. The aircraft descended in an extremely perilous spiral maneuver, finally hitting the second floor of the west façade horizontally, without hitting the turf in front of the building. It is absolutely impossible, since at such low altitude and high speed, such a plane loses all of its lift. And even if it were possible, the feat would have been beyond the capacity of Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot of the aircraft. A few months before September 11th, Hanjour was written up for incompetence due to lack of control by an Arizona flight school, who then called for the withdrawal of his license. His trainer Peggy Chevrette said: “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had”. An instructor at JetTech, the flight school attended by Hanjour during January and February 2001, is quoted in the New York Times, April 5th, 2002 saying: “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all”. In August, Hanjour was still unable to fly a small Cessna 172.



These conclusions are also valid for the planes that hit the twin towers. The group Pilots for 9/11 Truth emphasizes that their speeds were well above the limits of a Boeing 767 for the given altitude, and were, in any case, impossible for inexperienced pilots as the hijackers were claimed to be. For the aircraft that crashed into the South Tower, for example, officer Dwain Deets of NASA said: “based on analysis of radar data, the National Transportation and Safety Board reported the ground speed just before impact as 510 knots. This is well beyond the maximum operating velocity of 360 knots, and maximum dive velocity of 410 knots”. Neither were the pilots of sufficient skill to achieve such maneuvers: Nawaqal-Hazmi and Khaidal-Mihdhar’s instructor in San Diego told the Washington Post (September 24th, 2001): “their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse. […] It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car”.



Many other inconsistencies have been found; the Bureau of Transportation, which holds precise records of all flights, has no trace of Flight AA77 on September 11th – it was not planned at Dulles Airport that day, and its takeoff was not recorded. As for Flight UA93, it doesn’t normally circulate Tuesdays, but as an exception, it had welcomed passengers initially planned for flight UA91, which had been canceled due to a “crack in the windshield”. This flight was recorded at takeoff, but then it is also recorded as having landed in San Francisco at 12 pm, 45 minutes late. Finally, the mayor of Cleveland, Michael White, was quoted at 11:50 am on ABC News saying that a Boeing 767 flying out of Boston was forced to make an emergency landing in Cleveland due to a bomb threat, and had been taken to a secure area of the airport to be evacuated. United Airlines would claim that it was Flight UA93, although a Boeing 767 out of Boston corresponded rather to the Flight UA175.

The problem of the “transponders” is also perplexing. This device transmits the position of aircraft to control towers, and also allows the pilot to send alert and emergency messages. Incredibly, none of the eight pilots nor their professional copilots entered the four-digit code on the transponder which signals an assault on the cockpit – a maneuver that takes only three seconds. In fact, each aircraft actually cut their respective transponders, and then completely disappeared from secondary radars for nearly an hour while going through radar gaps. For example: AA77 left Washington for Los Angeles, disappeared from radars near Ohio and was spotted again an hour later near Washington DC.



According to official reports, many passengers of Flight UA93 had made calls before trying to directly control the terrorists and crashing in Pennsylvania. However, the technology required to make high-altitude phone calls was not developed until 2004. For this reason, the FBI claimed possible only two of these calls, made at the very end of the flight, at 1500 meters altitude. But even these calls include oddities completely incongruent with the context, exemplified by Mark Bingham’s call to his mother a few seconds before his death: “Hi, Mom. This is Mark Bingham”. Peculiarities such as this suggest that the calls were in fact simulated, possibly with the help of voice morphing — now a relatively reliable way to reproduce any voice on the basis of a sample. The call that garnered the most comments was one that allegedly took place twice from AA77: Barbara Olson, a well known CNN reporter, is said to have placed two calls to her husband Ted Olson, who happens to have been Solicitor General during the first Bush term (he defended Bush in the disputed 2000 election, and then Dick Cheney when he refused to submit over to Congress Enron related documents during their investigation). Repeatedly invited on television shows, Olson frequently contradicted himself when questioned regarding the calls from his wife. Sometimes he said she “called him twice on a cell phone ” adding that the second call was cut because “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well”. Sometimes he said that his wife called collect from the “air phone” because “she somehow didn't have access to her credit cards”. This second version is as impossible as the first, because a credit card is required to activate the phones in the seats, even for a collect call, though really the entire argument is moot, given that the seats on AA77 were not equipped with telephones (as confirmed by American Airlines). The most troubling contradiction appeared in 2006, during the trial of supposed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui: in their report on Flight AA77, the FBI attributed only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an unconnected call lasting 0 seconds.



Given the many impossibilities woven throughout the official story, the alternative hypothesis that seems most likely is that none of the four airplanes were in fact the Boeing 767 or 757s the world was told about. Flights AA77 and UA93 probably never existed. As for Flights AA11 and UA175, which reportedly hit the Twin Towers, several hypotheses are in competition among 9/11 truthers. Until 2012, a majority supposed that they had been replaces by drones, planes equipped with automatic remote control technology, and without passengers. But a recent analysis by video compositing expert Ace Baker in his documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera gives credence to the thesis defended from the beginning by professor Morgan Reynold, that the images of the des crash, showing the plane penetrate without resistance in the towers, as if their aluminum body and winds could cut steel columns, defy physical laws. All images of the two crashes, in very limited numbers, are of very poor quality and could very well be fakes. We know that the only images of the first crash into the North Tower were captured by the brothers Jules et Gédéon Naudet, otherwise totally unknown, and released several days later. The second crash was broadcast live on three channels but betray gross inconsistencies, which explains why they were never replayed on TV and replaced by better films later in the day — not to mention the many witnesses who declared that there was no plane, just explosions. The reader is advised to watch chapters 6, 7 and 8 of Ace Baker’s film and judge it by himself.   



These considerations, of course, leave open the issue of the passengers of the planes listed among the victims. One should note, however, that on average, each of the four flights was only one quarter full, the flight UA93, for example, carried only 37 passengers (including four terrorists) out of the 200 seats it had available. And here again, anomalies have been noticed by some researchers in the official memorials, which tend to indicate that some of the victims at least have been invented.



Before we can hope to identify the masterminds behind the exceptionally complex operation of September 11th, we can try to identify some of the key players, as we have already started doing in relation to the Twin Towers. It seems likely that Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, and Richard Myers, commander of the U.S. Air Force and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were steering the operation from the Pentagon. They testified before the 9/11 Commission that they were not in contact with each other until too late that day, which meant the chain of command was broken and explained the failure of the air defense system, for since June 1st, 2001, by an absurd order signed by Rumsfeld, no military interception could be carried out without approval by the Secretary of Defense. However, Richard Clarke, coordinator for counter-terrorism in the National Security Council, declares in his book Against All Enemies (2004) that he was in Cheney’s company in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a bunker in the basement of the White House), while he video-conferenced with Rumsfeld and Myers around 9:35 am, before the explosion at the Pentagon.



Air defense is the responsibility of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), and in particular its NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) department. NORAD had successfully intercepted 67 planes throughout the twelve months preceding September 11th, 2001, each time in less than twenty minutes. Intercept tactics are triggered at the slightest alarm, as part of precautionary measures. Even if we assume that NORAD could not have intercepted Flights AA11 and UA175 before they crashed into the Twin Towers, it is incomprehensible that it could not intercept Flight AA77, which crashed 50 minutes later into the Pentagon, the most secure building in the world. Something or somebody must have deliberately prevented normal procedure, as Robert Bowman, Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force, has assumed: “If our government had done nothing that day and let normal procedure be followed, those planes, wherever they were, would have been intercepted, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive”.



Contradicting Condoleezza Rice and President Bush, who declared in 2002 that no one could have predicted this kind of attack, USA Today revealed on April 18th, 2004 that NORAD was conducting, four times a year since 1999, military drills — or war games — that involved aircraft hijacked by terrorists and directed against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. With these new facts, the rather shallow excuses for American air defense ineffectiveness on September 11 was turned on its head: it was then explained that on that very day, NORAD was too busy with five military exercises, three of which, under the names of Vigilant Guardian, Global Guardian, and Vigilant Warrior, were simulated hijackings, both with real and virtual flights. Consequently, according to Colonel Robert Marr, head of NEADS, up to twenty-nine “hijacked planes” were on the radar screens at NORAD on that day. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Dwane Deskins, head of Vigilant Guardian quoted in an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard on January 20th, 2002, everyone concerned at NEADS initially thought that the announcement of the hijacking of Flight AA11 was part of the ongoing military exercises.



This aspect of the case is crucial to understanding the unfolding of the attacks on September 11th. As was explained by Captain Eric H. May, a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, “the easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out” (Global Research, February 23, 2008). Once the exercise is fully developed, it will require nothing more but to change a single parameter to turn the operation from simulated to real. It means that for most of the participants, accustomed to obey military orders and the established ‘rules of the (war) game’, they act without knowing in what they are participating; when they finally understand, they simultaneously know that they will be the first to fall if they raise objections. As in the Kennedy assassination, military discipline is the key to ensuring the necessary silence of all unwilling, or unknowing participants. Note, by the way, that the pilot of Flight AA77 that supposedly crashed into the Pentagon was Charles Burlingame: a former Navy pilot, he worked at the Pentagon while flying for American Airlines, and in the 1990s, he took part in a simulation in which a Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon.