Friend - This is written by David Griffen who is a theology professor at Claremont College in California. I think

he's very credible and I'm sharing this recent article......Wynn

 

 

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

 

By Prof. David Ray Griffin

 

Global Research, June 25, 2010

 

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One

that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be

“Obama’s Vietnam.” This question implies another: Is this

war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam?

These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement

that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as

corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried

to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

 

Although there are many similarities between these two wars,

there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If

there were a draft, so that college students and their friends

back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge

demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this

country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class

parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or

post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been

stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of

the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If

you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – 

hire mercenaries!

 

There are many other questions that have been, and should be,

asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did

the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

 

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be

raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream

media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the

war during the past several years has been justified by those

attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask

whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

 

However, what can be designated the “McChrystal Moment” –

the probably brief period during which the media are again

focused on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Rolling

Stone story about General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US

and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which led to his resignation –

provides the best opportunity for some time to raise fundamental

questions about this war. Various commentators have already been

asking some pretty basic questions: about the effectiveness and

affordability of the present “counterinsurgency strategy” and

even whether American fighting forces should remain in

Afghanistan at all. But I am interested in an even more

fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified

by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September

11, 2001.

 

This question has two parts: First, did these attacks provide a

legal justification for the invasion of Afghanistan? Second, if

not, did they at least provide a moral justification?

 

I. Did 9/11 Provide Legal Justification for the War in

Afghanistan?

 

Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, international

law with regard to war has been defined by the UN Charter.

Measured by this standard, the US-led war in Afghanistan has been

illegal from the outset. 

 

Marjorie Cohn, a well-known professor of international law, wrote

in November 2001:

“[T]he bombings of Afghanistan by the United States and the

United Kingdom are illegal.”2

In 2008, Cohn repeated this argument in an article entitled

“Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War.” The point of the title

was that, although it was by then widely accepted that the war in

Iraq was illegal, the war in Afghanistan, in spite of the fact

that many Americans did not realize it, was equally illegal.3 Her

argument was based on the following facts:

 

First, according to international law as codified in the UN

Charter, disputes are to be brought to the UN Security Council,

which alone may authorize the use of force. Without this

authorization, any military activity against another country is

illegal.

 

Second, there are two exceptions: One is that, if your nation has

been subjected to an armed attack by another nation, you may

respond militarily in self-defense. This condition was not

fulfilled by the 9/11 attacks, however, because they were not

carried out by another nation: Afghanistan did not attack the

United States. Indeed, the 19 men charged with the crime were not

Afghans.

 

The other exception occurs when one nation has certain knowledge

that an armed attack by another nation is imminent – too

imminent to bring the matter to the Security Council. The need

for self-defense must be, in the generally accepted phrase,

"instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment

for deliberation.” Although the US government claimed that its

military operations in Afghanistan were justified by the need to

prevent a second attack, this need, even if real, was clearly not

urgent, as shown by the fact that the Pentagon did not launch its

invasion until almost a month later.

 

US political leaders have claimed, to be sure, that the UN did

authorize the US attack on Afghanistan. This claim, originally

made by the Bush-Cheney administration, was repeated by President

Obama in his West Point speech of December 1, 2009, in which he

said: “The United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of

all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks,” so US

troops went to Afghanistan “[u]nder the banner of . . . 

international legitimacy.”4

 

However, the language of “all necessary steps” is from UN

Security Council Resolution 1368, in which the Council, taking

note of its own “responsibilities under the Charter," expressed

its own readiness “to take all necessary steps to respond to

the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.”5

 

Of course, the UN Security Council might have determined that one

of these necessary steps was to authorize an attack on

Afghanistan by the United States. But it did not. Resolution

1373, the only other Security Council resolution about this

issue, laid out various responses, but these included matters

such as freezing assets, criminalizing the support of terrorists,

exchanging police information 
about terrorists, and

prosecuting terrorists. The use of military force was not

mentioned.6

 

The US war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the UN Security

Council in 2001 or at anytime since, so this war began as an

illegal war and remains an illegal war today. Our government’s

claim to the contrary is false.

 

This war has been illegal, moreover, not only under international

law, but also under US law. The UN Charter is a treaty, which was

ratified by the United States, and, according to Article VI of

the US Constitution, any treaty ratified by the United States is

part of the “supreme law of the land.”7 The war in

Afghanistan, therefore, has from the beginning been in violation

of US as well as international law. It could not be more illegal.

 

II. Did 9/11 Provide Moral Justification for the War in

Afghanistan?

 

The American public has for the most part probably been unaware

of the illegality of this war, because this is not something our

political leaders or our corporate media have been anxious to

point out.8 So most people simply do not know.

 

If they were informed, however, many Americans would be inclined

to argue that, even if technically illegal, the US military

effort in Afghanistan has been morally justified, or at least it

was in the beginning, by the attacks of 9/11. For a summary

statement of this argument, we can turn again to the West Point

speech of President Obama, who has taken over the Bush-Cheney

account of 9/11. Answering the question of “why America and our

allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first

place,” Obama said:  

“We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen

men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000

people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers.

They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without

regard to their faith or race or station. . . . As we know, these

men belonged to al Qaeda – a group of extremists who have

distorted and defiled Islam. . . . [A]fter the Taliban refused to

turn over Osama bin Laden - we sent our troops into

Afghanistan.”9

This standard account can be summarized in terms of three points:

 

1. The attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim members of al-Qaeda.

 

2. The attacks had been authorized by the founder of al-Qaeda,

Osama bin Laden, who was in Afghanistan.

 

3. The US invasion of Afghanistan was necessary because the

Taliban, which was in control of Afghanistan, refused to turn bin

Laden over to US authorities.

 

On the basis of these three points, our political leaders have

claimed that the United States had the moral right, arising from

the universal right of self-defense, to attempt to capture or

kill bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network to prevent them from

launching another attack on our country.

 

The only problem with this argument is that all three points are

false. I will show this by looking at these points in reverse

order.

 

1. Did the United States Attack Afghanistan because the Taliban

Refused to Turn Over Bin Laden?

 

The claim that the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden has

been repeatedly made by political leaders and our mainstream

media.10 Reports from the time, however, show the truth to be

very different.

 

A. Who Refused Whom?

 

Ten days after the 9/11 attacks, CNN reported:

“The Taliban . . . refus[ed] to hand over bin Laden without

proof or evidence that he was involved in last week's attacks on

the United States. . . . The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan . . .

said Friday that deporting him without proof would amount to an

‘insult to Islam.’"

CNN also made clear that the Taliban’s demand for proof was not

made without reason, saying:

“Bin Laden himself has already denied he had anything to do

with the attacks, and Taliban officials repeatedly said he could

not have been involved in the attacks.”

Bush, however, “said the demands were not open to negotiation

or discussion.”11

 

With this refusal to provide any evidence of bin Laden’s

responsibility, the Bush administration made it impossible for

the Taliban to turn him over. As Afghan experts quoted by the

Washington Post pointed out, the Taliban, in order to turn over a

fellow Muslim to an “infidel” Western nation, needed a

“face-saving formula.” Milton Bearden, who had been the CIA

station chief in Afghanistan in the 1980s, put it this way: While

the United States was demanding, “Give up bin Laden,” the

Taliban were saying, “Do something to help us give him up.”12

But the Bush administration refused.

 

After the bombing began in October, moreover, the Taliban tried

again, offering to turn bin Laden over to a third country if the

United States would stop the bombing and provide evidence of his

guilt. But Bush replied: "There's no need to discuss innocence or

guilt. We know he's guilty." An article in London’s Guardian,

which reported this development, was entitled: “Bush Rejects

Taliban Offer to Hand Bin Laden Over.”13 So it was the Bush

administration, not the Taliban, that was responsible for the

fact that bin Laden was not turned over.

 

In August of 2009, President Obama, who had criticized the US

invasion of Iraq as a war of choice, said of the US involvement

in Afghanistan: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of

necessity.”14 But the evidence shows, as we have seen, that it,

like the one in Iraq, is a war of choice. 

 

B. What Was the Motive for the Invasion?

 

This conclusion is reinforced by reports indicating that the

United States had made the decision to invade Afghanistan two

months before the 9/11 attacks. At least part of the background

to this decision was the United States’ long-time support for

UNOCAL’s proposed pipeline, which would transport oil and

natural gas from the Caspian Sea region to the Indian Ocean

through Afghanistan and Pakistan.15 This project had been stymied

through the 1990s because of the civil war that had been going on

in Afghanistan since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

 

In the mid-1990s, the US government had supported the Taliban

with the hope that its military strength would enable it to unify

the country and provide a stable government, which could protect

the pipeline. By the late 1990s, however, the Clinton

administration had given up on the Taliban.16

 

When the Bush administration came to power, it decided to give

the Taliban one last chance. During a four-day meeting in Berlin

in July 2001, representatives of the Bush administration insisted

that the Taliban must create a government of “national unity”

by sharing power with factions friendly to the United States. The

US representatives reportedly said: “Either you accept our

offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of

bombs.”17

 

After the Taliban refused this offer, US officials told a former

Pakistani foreign secretary that “military action against

Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling

in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”18 And,

indeed, given the fact that the attacks on the World Trade Center

and the Pentagon occurred when they did, the US military was able

to mobilize to begin its attack on Afghanistan by October 7.

 

It appears, therefore, that the United States invaded Afghanistan

for reasons far different from the official rationale, according

to which we were there to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

 

2. Has Good Evidence of Bin Laden’s Responsibility Been

Provided?

 

I turn now to the second point: the claim that Osama bin Laden

had authorized the attacks. Even if it refused to give the

Taliban evidence for this claim, the Bush administration surely

– most Americans probably assume – had such evidence and

provided it to those who needed it. Again, however, reports from

the time indicate otherwise.

 

A. The Bush Administration

 

Two weeks after 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that

he expected “in the near future . . . to put out . . . a

document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we

have linking [bin Laden] to this attack.”19 But at a joint

press conference with President Bush the next morning, Powell

withdrew this pledge, saying that “most of [the evidence] is

classified.”20 Seymour Hersh, citing officials from both the

CIA and the Department of Justice, said the real reason why

Powell withdrew the pledge was a “lack of solid

information.”21

 

B. The British Government

 

The following week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a

document to show that “Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the

terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the

atrocities on 11 September 2001.” Blair’s report, however,

began by saying: “This document does not purport to provide a

prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law.”22

So, the case was good enough to go to war, but not good enough to

take to court. The next day, the BBC emphasized this weakness,

saying: “There is no direct evidence in the public domain

linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks.”23

 

C. The FBI

 

What about our own FBI? Its “Most Wanted Terrorist” webpage

on “Usama bin Laden” does not list 9/11 as one of the

terrorist acts for which he is wanted.24 When asked why not, the

FBI’s chief of investigative publicity replied: “because the

FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”25

 

D. The 9/11 Commission

 

What about the 9/11 Commission? Its entire report is based on the

assumption that bin Laden was behind the attacks. However, the

report’s evidence to support this premise has been disowned by

the Commission’s own co-chairs, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.

 

This evidence consisted of testimony that had reportedly been

elicited by the CIA from al-Qaeda operatives. The most important

of these operatives was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – generally

known simply as “KSM” – who has been called the

“mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. If you read the 9/11

Commission’s account of how bin Laden planned the attacks, and

then check the notes, you will find that almost every note says

that the information came from KSM.26

 

In 2006, Kean and Hamilton wrote a book giving “the inside

story of the 9/11 Commission,” in which they called this

information untrustworthy. They had no success, they reported, in

“obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most

notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”27 Besides not being allowed by

the CIA to interview KSM, they were not permitted to observe his

interrogation through one-way glass. They were not even allowed

to talk to the interrogators.28 Therefore, Kean and Hamilton

complained:

“We . . . had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee

information. How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed . . . was telling us the truth?”29

They could not.

 

Accordingly, neither the Bush administration, the British

government, the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission ever provided good

evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the attacks.

 

E. Did Bin Laden Confess?

 

Some people argue, to be sure, that such evidence soon became

unnecessary because bin Laden admitted his responsibility in a

videotape that was discovered by the US military in Jalalabad,

Afghanistan, in November 2001. But besides the fact that bin

Laden had previously denied his involvement many times,30 bin

Laden experts have called this later video a fake,31 and for good

reasons. Many of the physical features of the man in this video

are different from those of Osama bin Laden (as seen in

undoubtedly authentic videos), and he said many things that bin

Laden himself would not have said.32

 

The FBI, in any case, evidently does not believe that this video

provides hard evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for 9/11,

or it would have revised its “Most Wanted Terrorist” page on

him after this video surfaced.

 

So, to review the first two points: The Taliban said it would

turn over bin Laden if our government would give it good evidence

of his responsibility for 9/11, but our government refused. And

good evidence of this responsibility has never been given to the

public. 

 

I turn now to the third claim: that, even if there is no proof

that Osama bin Laden authorized the attacks, we have abundant

evidence that the attacks were carried out by Muslims belonging

to his al-Qaeda organization. I will divide the discussion of

this third claim into two sections: Section 3a looks at the main

support for this claim: evidence that Muslim hijackers were on

the airliners. Section 3b looks at the strongest evidence against

this claim: the collapse of World Trade Center 7.

 

3a. Evidence Al-Qaeda Muslims Were on the Airliners

 

It is still widely thought to have been established beyond

question that the attacks were carried out by members of

al-Qaeda. The truth, however, is that the evidence entirely falls

apart upon examination, and this fact suggests that 9/11 was

instead a false-flag attack - an attack that people within our

own government orchestrated while planting evidence to implicate

Muslims.

 

A. Devout Muslims?

 

Let us begin with the 9/11 Commission’s claim that the men who

(allegedly) took over the planes were devout Muslims, ready to

sacrifice their lives for their cause.

 

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Atta and other

hijackers had made “at least six trips” to Las Vegas, where

they had “engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of

prohibited pleasures.” The Chronicle then quoted the head of

the Islamic Foundation of Nevada as saying: "True Muslims don't

drink, don't gamble, don't go to strip clubs.”33

 

The contradiction is especially strong with regard to Mohamed

Atta. On the one hand, according to the 9/11 Commission, he was

very religious, even “fanatically so.”34 This

characterization was supported by Professor Dittmar Machule, who

was Atta’s thesis supervisor at a technical university in

Hamburg in the 1990s. Professor Machule says he knew his student

only as Mohamed Al-Emir – although his full name was the same

as his father’s: Mohamed Al-Emir Atta. In any case, Machule

says that this young man was “very religious,” prayed

regularly, and never touched alcohol.35

 

According to the American press, on the other hand, Mohamed Atta

drank heavily and, one night after downing five glasses of Vodka,

shouted an Arabic word that, Newsweek said, “roughly translates

as ‘F--k God.’”36 Investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker,

who wrote a book about Atta, stated that Atta regularly went to

strip clubs, hired prostitutes, drank heavily, and took cocaine.

Atta even lived with a stripper for several months and then,

after she kicked him out, she reported, he came back and

disemboweled her cat and dismembered its kittens.37

 

Could this be the same individual as Professor Machule’s

student Mohamed Al-Emir, who would not even shake hands with a

woman upon being introduced, and who never touched alcohol? “I

would put my hand in the fire,” said the professor, “that

this Mohamed El-Amir I know will never taste or touch alcohol.”

Could the Atta described by Hopsicker and the American press be

the young man whom this professor described as not a “bodyguard

type” but “more a girl looking type”?38 Could the man who

disemboweled a cat and dismembered its kittens be the young man

known to his father as a “gentle and tender boy,” who was

nicknamed “nightingale”?39

 

We are clearly talking about two different men. This is confirmed

by the differences in their appearance. The American Atta was

often described as having a hard, cruel face, and the standard

FBI photo of him bears this out. The face of the Hamburg student

was quite different, as photos available on the Internet show.40

Also, his professor described him as “very small,” being

“one meter sixty-two” in height41 – which means slightly

under 5’4” – whereas the American Atta has been described

as 5’8” and even 5’10” tall.42

 

One final reason to believe that these different descriptions

apply to different men: The father of Mohamed al-Emir Atta

reported that on September 12, before either of them had learned

of the attacks, his son called him and they “spoke for two

minutes about this and that.”43

 

There are also problems in relation to many of the other alleged

hijackers. For example, the BBC reported that Waleed al-Shehri,

who supposedly died along with Atta on American Flight 11, spoke

to journalists and American authorities in Casablanca the

following week.44 Moreover, there were clearly two men going by

the name Ziad Jarrah – the name of the alleged hijacker pilot

of United Flight 93.45

 

Accordingly, besides the fact the men labeled “the hijackers”

were not devout Muslims, they may not have even been Muslims of

any type.

 

And if that were not bad enough for the official story, there is

no good evidence that these men were even on the planes - all the

evidence for this claim falls apart upon examination. I will

illustrate this point with a few examples.46

 

B. Passports at the Crash Sites

 

One of the purported proofs that the 19 men identified as the

hijackers were on the planes was the reported discovery of some

of their passports at crash sites. But the reports of these

discoveries are not believable. 

 

For example, the FBI claimed that, while searching the streets

after the destruction of the World Trade Center, they discovered

the passport of Satam al-Suqami, one of the hijackers on American

Flight 11, which had crashed into the North Tower.47 But for this

to be true, the passport would have had to survive the collapse

of the North Tower, which evidently pulverized almost everything

in the building into fine particles of dust – except the steel

and al-Suqami’s passport.

 

But this claim was too absurd to pass the giggle test: “[T]he

idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno

unsinged,” remarked a British commentator, “would [test] the

credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on

terrorism.”48 By 2004, the claim had been modified to say that

“a passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective

shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed.”49 So,

rather than needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower,

the passport merely needed to escape from al-Suqami’s pocket or

luggage, then from the plane’s cabin, and then from the North

Tower without being destroyed or even singed by the giant

fireball.

 

This version was no less ridiculous than the first one, and the

other stories about passports at crash sites are equally absurd.

 

C. Reported Phone Calls from the Airliners

 

It is widely believed, of course, that we know that there were

hijackers on the airliners, thanks to numerous phone calls from

passengers and crew members, in which they reported the

hijackings. But we have good reasons to believe that these calls

never occurred.

 

Reported Calls from Cell Phones: About 15 of the reported calls

from the airliners were said to have been made on cell phones,

with about 10 of those being from United Flight 93 – the one

that reportedly crashed in Pennsylvania. Three or four of those

calls were received by Deena Burnett, who knew that her husband,

Tom Burnett, had used his cell phone, she told the FBI, because

she recognized his cell phone number on her Caller ID.

 

However, given the cell phone technology available in 2001,

high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners were not possible.

They were generally not possible much above 1,000 feet, and were

certainly impossible above 35,000 or even 40,000 feet, which was

the altitude of the planes when most of the cell phone calls were

supposedly made. Articles describing the impossibility of the

calls were published in 2003 and 2004 by two well-known

Canadians: A. K. Dewdney, formerly a columnist for Scientific

American, and economist Michel Chossudovsky.50

 

Perhaps in response, the FBI changed the story. In 2006, it

presented a report on the phone calls from the planes for the

trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. In its

report on United Flight 93, it said that cell phones were used

for only two of the calls, both of which were made the plane,

shortly before it crashed, had descended to a low altitude.51

These two calls were, in fact, the only two cell phone calls made

from any of the airliners, the FBI report said.52 The FBI thereby

avoided claiming that any high-altitude cell phone calls had been

made.

 

But if the FBI’s new account is true, how do we explain that so

many people reported receiving cell phone calls? Most of these

people said that they had been told by the caller that he or she

was using a cell phone, so we might suppose that their reports

were based on bad hearing or faulty memory. But what about Deena

Burnett, whose statement that she recognized her husband’s cell

phone number on her Caller ID was made to the FBI that very

day?53 If Tom Burnett used a seat-back phone, as the FBI’s 2006

report says, why did his cell phone number show up on his

wife’s Caller ID? The FBI has not answered this question.

 

The only possible explanation seems to be that these calls were

faked. Perhaps someone used voice morphing technology, which

already existed at that time,54 in combination with a device for

providing a fake Caller ID, which can be ordered on the Internet.

Or perhaps someone used Tom’s cell phone to place fake calls

from the ground. In either case, Tom Burnett did not actually

call his wife from aboard United Flight 93. And if calls to Deena

Burnett were faked, we must assume that all of the calls were –

because if there had really been surprise hijackings, no one

would have been prepared to make fake phone calls to her.

 

The Reported Calls from Barbara Olson: This conclusion is

reinforced by the FBI’s report on phone calls from American

Flight 77 – the one that supposedly struck the Pentagon. Ted

Olson, the US Solicitor General, reported that his wife, Barbara

Olson (a well-known commentator on CNN), had called him twice

from this flight, with the first call lasting “about one (1)

minute,”55 and the second call lasting “two or three or four

minutes.”56 In these calls, he said, she reported that the

plane had been taken over by hijackers armed with knives and

box-cutters.

 

But how could she have made these calls? The plane was far too

high for a cell phone to work. And American Flight 77 was a

Boeing 757, and the 757s made for American Airlines – the 9/11

Truth Movement learned in 2005 – did not have onboard phones.57

Whether or not for this reason, the FBI’s report to the

Moussaoui trial did not endorse Ted Olson’s story. Its report

on telephone calls from American Flight 77 did mention Barbara

Olson, but it attributed only one call to her, not two, and it

said that this call was “unconnected,” so that it  lasted

“0 seconds.”58

 

This FBI report allows only two possibilities: Either Ted Olson

engaged in deception, or he, like Deena Burnett, was duped by

faked calls. In either case, the story about Barbara Olson’s

calls, with their reports of hijackers taking over Flight 77, was

based on deception.

 

The alleged phone calls, therefore, do not provide trustworthy

evidence that there were hijackers on the planes.

 

D. Autopsy Reports and Flight Manifests 

 

The public has widely assumed, due to misleading claims,59 that

the names of the alleged hijackers were on the flight manifests

for the four flights, and also that the autopsy report from the

Pentagon contained the names of the hijackers said to have been

on American Flight 77. However, the passenger manifests for the

four airliners did not contain the names of any of the alleged

hijackers and, moreover, they contained no Arab names

whatsoever.60 Also, as a psychiatrist who was able to obtain a

copy of the Pentagon autopsy report through a FOIA request

discovered, it contained none of the names of the hijackers for

American Flight 77 and, in fact, no Arab names whatsoever.61

 

E. Failure to Squawk the Hijack Code

 

Finally, the public has been led to believe that all the evidence

about what happened on board the four airliners supported the

claim that they were taken over by hijackers. This claim,

however, was contradicted by something that did not happen. If

pilots have any reason to believe that a hijacking may be in

process, they are trained to enter the standard hijack code

(7500) into their transponders to alert controllers on the

ground. This is called “squawking” the hijack code. None of

the eight pilots did this on 9/11, even though there would have

been plenty of time: This act takes only two or three seconds and

it would have taken longer than this for hijackers to break into

the pilots’ cabins: According to official account of United

Flight 93, for example, it took over 30 seconds for the hijackers

to break into the cockpit.62

 

F. False-Flag Attack

 

It appears, therefore, that 9/11 was the most elaborate example

yet of a false-flag attack, which occurs when countries, wanting

to attack other countries, orchestrate attacks on their own

people while planting evidence to implicate those other

countries. Hitler did this when he was ready to attack Poland,

which started the European part of World War II; Japan did it

when it was ready to attack Manchuria, which started the Asian

part of that war. In 1962, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff

proposed false-flag attacks killing American citizens to provide

a pretext for invading Cuba.63 This proposal was not put into

effect because it was vetoed by President Kennedy. But in 2001,

the White House was occupied by an administration that wanted to

attack Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other predominantly Muslim

countries,64 and so, it appears, evidence was planted to

implicate Muslims.

 

3b. How the Collapse of WTC 7 Disproves the Al-Qaeda Theory

 

I turn now to the strongest evidence that the 9/11 attacks were

orchestrated by insiders rather than foreign terrorists: the

collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center, which is the

subject of my most recent book, The Mysterious Collapse of World

Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is

Unscientific and False.65

 

A. Mysterious Collapse

 

I speak of the “mysterious collapse” because the collapse of

this building was, from the very beginning, seen as more

mysterious than that of the Twin Towers. Given the fact that

those two buildings were hit by planes, which started big fires,

most people evidently thought – if wrongly - that the fact that

these buildings came down was not problematic. But Building 7 was

not hit by a plane, and yet it came down at 5:21 that afternoon.

 

This would mean, assuming that neither incendiaries nor

explosives were used to demolish this building, that it had been

brought down by fire alone, and this would have been an

unprecedented occurrence. New York Times writer James Glanz

wrote, “experts said no building like it, a modern,

steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an

uncontrolled fire.” Glanz then quoted a structural engineer as

saying: “[W]ithin the structural engineering community,

[Building 7] is considered to be much more important to

understand [than the Twin Towers],” because engineers had no

answer to the question, “why did 7 come down?”66

 

Moreover, although Glanz spoke of an “uncontrolled fire,”

there were significant fires on only six of this building’s 47

floors, and these fires were visible at most for three to four

hours, and yet fires have burned in other steel-frame skyscrapers

for 17 and 18 hours, turning them into towering infernos without

causing collapse.67 So why did Building 7 come down? FEMA, which

in 2002 put out the first official report on this building,

admitted that its “best hypothesis” had “only a low

probability of occurrence.”68

 

B. Reasons to Suspect Explosives

 

By its “best hypothesis,” FEMA meant the best hypothesis it

could suggest consistent with the fact that it, as a government

agency, could not posit the use of incendiaries and explosives.

Why might anyone think that incendiaries and explosives brought

this building down?

 

Precedent: One reason is simply that, prior to 9/11, every

collapse of a steel-frame high-rise building was brought about by

explosives, often in conjunction with incendiaries, in the

procedure known as “controlled demolition.” Collapse has

never been produced by fires, earthquakes, or any other cause

other than controlled demolition. 

 

Vertical Collapse: Another reason to posit controlled demolition

is that this building came straight down, collapsing into its own

footprint. For this to happen, all of this building’s 82 steel

columns had to fail simultaneously. This is what happens in the

type of controlled demolition known as “implosion.” It is not

something that can be caused by fires.

 

Simply seeing a video of the building coming down makes it

obvious to anyone with knowledge of these things that explosives

were used to bring it down. On 9/11 itself, CBS News anchor Dan

Rather said:

“[I]t’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen . . .

on television . . . , where a building was deliberately destroyed

by well-placed dynamite to knock it down.”69

In 2006, a filmmaker asked Danny Jowenko, the owner of a

controlled demolition company in the Netherlands, to comment on a

video of the collapse of Building 7 without telling him what it

was. (Jowenko had never heard that a third building had collapsed

on 9/11.) After viewing the video, Jowenko said: “They simply

blew up columns, and the rest caved in afterwards. . . . This is

controlled demolition.” When asked if he was certain, he

replied: “Absolutely, it’s been imploded. This was a hired

job. A team of experts did this.”70

 

An organization called “Architects and Engineers for 9/11

Truth,” which was formed in 2007, now has over 1,200 members.

Many of them, as one can see by reading their statements, joined

after they saw a video of Building 7’s collapse.71

 

In light of all of these considerations, a truly scientific

investigation, which sought the truth about Building 7, would

have begun with the hypothesis that it had been deliberately

demolished.

 

C. NIST’s Report as Political, Not Scientific

 

However, this hypothesis did not provide the starting point for

NIST – the National Institute of Standards and Technology –

which took over from FEMA the responsibility for writing the

official report on the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Rather, NIST said:

“The challenge was to determine if a fire-induced floor system

failure could occur in WTC 7 under an ordinary building contents

fire.”72

So, although every other steel-frame building that has collapsed

did so because explosives (perhaps along with incendiaries) were

used to destroy its support columns, NIST said, in effect: “We

think fire brought down WTC 7.” To understand why NIST started

with this hypothesis, it helps to know that it is an agency of

the Commerce Department, which means that all the years it was

working on its World Trade Center reports, it was an agency of

the Bush-Cheney administration.

 

Also, a scientist who had worked for NIST reported that by 2001

it had been “fully hijacked from the scientific into the

political realm,” so that scientists working there had “lost

[their] scientific independence, and became little more than

‘hired guns.’”73

 

One manifestation of NIST’s political nature may be the fact

that it delayed its report on Building 7 year after year,

releasing it only late in 2008, when the Bush-Cheney

administration was preparing to leave office.

 

Be that as it may, NIST did in August of 2008 finally put out a

report in the form of a draft for public comment. Announcing this

draft report at a press conference, Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead

investigator, said:

“Our take-home message today is that the reason for the

collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC 7

collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did

not collapse from explosives.”74

Sunder added that “science is really behind what we have

said.”75

 

However, far from being supported by good science, NIST’s

report repeatedly makes its case by resorting to scientific

fraud. Two of the major types of scientific fraud, as defined by

the National Science Foundation, are fabrication, which is

“making up results,” and falsification, which means either

“changing or omitting data.”76 I will begin with

falsification.

 

D. NIST’S Falsification of Testimonial Evidence Pointing to

Explosives

 

Claiming that it “found no evidence of a . . . controlled

demolition event,”77 NIST simply omitted or distorted all such

evidence, some of which was testimonial.

 

Two city officials, Barry Jennings of the Housing Authority and

Michael Hess, the city’s corporation counsel, reported that

they became trapped by a massive explosion in Building 7 shortly

after they arrived there at 9:00 AM. NIST, however, claimed that

what they called an explosion was really just the impact of

debris from the collapse of the North Tower, which did not occur

until 10:28. But Jennings explicitly said that they were trapped

before either of the Twin Towers came down, which means that the

explosion that he and Hess reported occurred before 9:59, when

the South Tower came down. NIST rather obviously, therefore,

distorted these men’s testimonial evidence.

 

Other people reported that explosions went off in the late

afternoon, when the building started to come down. Reporter Peter

Demarco of the New York Daily News said:

“[T]here was a rumble. The building's top row of windows popped

out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out.

Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard

until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray.”78

NIST dealt with such testimonies by simply ignoring them.

 

E. NIST’s Omission of Physical Evidence for Explosives

 

NIST also ignored a lot of physical evidence that Building 7 was

brought down by explosives.

 

Swiss-Cheese Steel: For example, three professors from Worcester

Polytechnic Institute discovered a piece of steel from Building 7

that had melted so severely that it had holes in it, making it

look like Swiss cheese.79 The New York Times, pointing out that

the fires in the building could not have been hot enough to melt

steel, called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the

investigation.”80 The three professors, in a report included as

an appendix to the 2002 FEMA report, said: “A detailed study

into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed.”81

 

When NIST’s report on Building 7 appeared, however, it did not

mention this mysterious piece of steel. It even claimed that no

recovered steel from this building had been identified.82 And

this was just the beginning of NIST’s omission of physical

evidence.

 

Particles of Metal in the Dust: The nearby Deutsche Bank building

was heavily contaminated by dust produced when the World Trade

Center was destroyed. But the bank’s insurance company refused

to pay for the clean-up, claiming that the dust in the bank was

ordinary building dust, not dust that resulted from the

destruction of the WTC. So Deutsche Bank hired the RJ Lee Group,

a scientific research organization, to do a study, which showed

that the dust in this building was WTC dust, with a unique

chemical signature. Part of this signature was “[s]pherical

iron . . . particles,”83 and this meant, the RJ Lee Group said,

that iron had “melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical

metallic particles.”84

 

Iron does not melt until it reaches 2,800°F (1,538°C), which is

about 1,000 degrees F (540 degrees C) higher than the fires could

have been. The RJ Lee study also found that temperatures had been

reached “at which lead would have undergone vaporization”85

– meaning 3,180°F (1,749°C).86

 

Another study was carried out by scientists at the US Geological

Survey. Besides also finding iron particles, these scientists

found that molybdenum had been melted87 – even though its

melting point is extremely high: 4,753°F (2,623°C).88

 

These two studies proved, therefore, that something had produced

temperatures many times higher than the fires could have

produced. NIST, however, made no mention of these studies. But

even this was not the end of the physical evidence omitted by

NIST.

 

Nanothermite Residue: A report by several scientists, including

University of Copenhagen chemist Niels Harrit, showed that the

WTC dust contained unreacted nanothermite. Whereas ordinary

thermite is an incendiary, nanothermite is a high explosive. This

report by Harrit and his colleagues did not appear until 2009,89

several months after the publication of NIST’s final report in

November 2008. But NIST should have, as a matter of routine,

tested the WTC dust for signs of incendiaries, such as ordinary

thermite, and explosives, such as nanothermite.

 

When asked whether it did, however, NIST said that it did not.

When a reporter asked Michael Newman, a NIST spokesman, why not,

Newman replied: “[B]ecause there was no evidence of that.”

“But,” asked the reporter, “how can you know there’s no

evidence if you don’t look for it first?” Newman replied:

“If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re

wasting your time . . . and the taxpayers’ money.”90

 

F. NIST’s Fabrication of Evidence to Support Its Own Theory

 

Besides omitting and distorting evidence to deny the demolition

theory of Building 7’s collapse, NIST also fabricated evidence

– simply made it up – to support its own theory.  

 

No Girder Shear Studs: NIST’s explanation as to how fire caused

Building 7 to collapse starts with thermal expansion, meaning

that the fire heated up the steel, thereby causing it to expand.

An expanding steel beam on the 13th floor, NIST claimed, caused a

steel girder attached to a column to break loose. Having lost its

support, this column failed, starting a chain reaction in which

the other 81 columns failed, causing a progressive collapse.91

Ignoring the question of whether this is even remotely plausible,

let us simply ask: Why did that girder fail? Because, NIST

claimed, it was not connected to the floor slab with sheer studs.

NIST wrote: In WTC 7, no studs were installed on the girders.92

Floor beams . . . had shear studs, but the girders that supported

the floor beams did not have shear studs.93 This was a

fabrication, as we can see by looking at NIST’s Interim Report

on WTC 7, which it had published in 2004. That report, written

before NIST had developed its girder-failure theory, stated that

girders as well as the beams had been attached to the floor by

means of shear studs.94

 

A Raging Fire on Floor 12 at 5:00 PM: Another case of fabrication

is a graphic in NIST’s report showing that at 5:00 PM, there

were very big fires covering much of the north face of Floor

12.95 This claim is essential to NIST’s explanation as to why

the building collapsed 21 minutes later. However, if you look

back at NIST’s 2004 report, you will find this statement:

“Around 4:45 PM, a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9,

and 11 near the middle of the north face; Floor 12 was burned out

by this time.”96

Other photographs even show that the 12th floor fire had

virtually burned out by 4:00. And yet NIST, in its final report,

claims that fires were still raging on this floor at 5:00 PM.

 

G. NIST’s Affirmation of a Miracle

 

In addition to omitting, falsifying, and fabricating evidence,

NIST affirms a miracle. You have perhaps seen the cartoon in

which a physics professor has written a proof on a chalkboard.

Most of the steps consist of mathematical equations, but one of

them simply says: “Then a miracle happens.” This is humorous

because one thing you absolutely cannot do in science is to

appeal to a miracle, even implicitly. And yet that is what NIST

does. I will explain:

 

NIST’S Denial of Free Fall: Members of the 9/11 Truth Movement

had long been pointing out that Building 7 came down at the same

rate as a free-falling object, at least virtually so.

 

In NIST’s Draft for Public Comment, put out in August 2008, it

denied this, saying that the time it took for the upper floors

– the only floors that are visible on the videos - to come down

“was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free

fall time and was consistent with physical principles.”97

 

As this statement implies, any assertion that the building did

come down in free fall would not be consistent with physical

principles – meaning the laws of physics. Explaining why not,

Shyam Sunder said: 

“[A] free fall time would be [the fall time of] an object that

has no structural components below it. . . . [T]he . . . time

that it took . . . for those 17 floors to disappear [was roughly

40 percent longer than free fall]. And that is not at all

unusual, because there was structural resistance that was

provided in this particular case. And you had a sequence of

structural failures that had to take place. Everything was not

instantaneous.”98

In saying this, Sunder was presupposing NIST’s rejection of

controlled demolition – which could have produced a free-fall

collapse by causing all 82 columns to fail simultaneously – in

favor of NIST’s fire theory, which necessitated a theory of

progressive collapse.

 

Chandler’s Challenge: In response, high-school physics teacher

David Chandler challenged Sunder’s denial of free fall,

pointing out that Sunder’s “40 percent longer” claim

contradicted “a publicly visible, easily measurable

quantity.”99 Chandler then placed a video on the Internet

showing that, by measuring this publicly visible quantity, anyone

knowing elementary physics could see that “for about two and a

half seconds. . . , the acceleration of the building is

indistinguishable from freefall.”100

 

NIST Admits Free Fall: Amazingly, in NIST’s final report, which

came out in November, it admitted free fall. Dividing the

building’s descent into three stages, NIST described the second

phase as “a freefall descent over approximately eight stories

at gravitational acceleration for approximately 2.25

s[econds].”101 (“Gravitational acceleration” is a synonym

for free fall acceleration.)

 

So, after presenting over 600 pages of descriptions, graphs,

testimonies, photographs, charts, analyses, explanations, and

mathematical formulae, NIST says, in effect: “Then a miracle

happens.”

 

Why this would be a miracle was explained by Chandler, who said:

“Free fall can only be achieved if there is zero resistance to

the motion.”102 In other words, the upper portion of Building 7

could have come down in free fall only if something had suddenly

removed all the steel and concrete in the lower part of the

building, which would have otherwise provided resistance. If

everything had not been removed and the upper floors had come

down in free fall anyway, even for only a second or two, a

miracle – meaning a violation of the laws of physics - would

have happened.

 

That was what Sunder himself had explained the previous August,

saying that a free-falling object would be one “that has no

structural components below it” to offer resistance.

 

But then in November, while still defending the fire theory of

collapse, NIST admitted that, as an empirical fact, free fall

happened. For a period of 2.25 seconds, NIST admitted, the

descent of WTC 7 was characterized by “gravitational

acceleration (free fall).”103

 

Knowing that it had thereby affirmed a miracle, NIST no longer

claimed that its analysis was consistent with the laws of

physics. In its August draft, in which it had said that the

collapse occurred 40 percent slower than free fall, NIST had said

three times that its analysis was “consistent with physical

principles.”104 In the final report, however, every instance of

this phrase was removed. NIST thereby almost explicitly admitted

that its report on WTC 7, by admitting free fall while continuing

to deny that explosives were used, is not consistent with the

principles of physics.

 

Conclusion about WTC 7: The science of World Trade Center 7 is,

therefore, settled. This fact is reflected in the agreement by

many hundreds of professionals with various forms of expertise

– architects, engineers, firefighters, physicists, and chemists

– that this building was deliberately demolished.

 

This truth has also recently been recognized by a symposium in

one of our leading social science journals, which treats 9/11 as

an example of what its authors call State Crimes Against

Democracy (SCADs).105 Criticizing the majority of the academic

world for its “blithe dismissal of more than one law of

thermodynamics” that is violated by the official theory of the

World Trade Center collapses, these authors also criticize the

academy for its failure to protest when “Professor Steven Jones

found himself forced out of tenured position for merely reminding

the world that physical laws, about which there is no dissent

whatsoever, contradict the official theory.”106

 

And now the world can see, if it will only look, that even NIST,

in its final report, did not dissent: By admitting that Building

7 came down in free fall for over two seconds, while

simultaneously removing its previous claim that its report was

consistent with physical principles, NIST implicitly admitted

that the laws of physics rule out its non-demolition theory of

this building’s collapse. NIST thereby implicitly admitted that

explosives were used.

 

H. Implications for the Al-Qaeda Theory of 9/11

 

And with that implicit admission, NIST undermined the al-Qaeda

theory of 9/11. Why?

 

For one thing, the straight-down nature of the collapse of WTC 7

means that it was subjected to the type of controlled demolition

known as “implosion,” which is, in the words of a controlled

demolition website, “by far the trickiest type of explosive

project,” which “only a handful of blasting companies in the

world . . . possess enough experience . . . to perform.”107

Al-Qaeda terrorists would not have had this kind of expertise.

 

Second, the only reason to go to the trouble of bringing a

building straight down is to avoid damaging nearby buildings. Had

WTC 7 and the Twin Towers – which also came straight down,

after initial explosions at the top that ejected sections of

steel outward several hundred feet108 - instead toppled over

sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in Lower

Manhattan, destroying dozens of other buildings and killing tens

of thousands of people. Does anyone believe that, even if

al-Qaeda operatives had had the expertise to make the buildings

come straight down, they would have had the courtesy?

 

A third problem is that foreign terrorists could not have

obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have

taken to plant explosives. Only insiders could have done this.109

 

The science of the collapse of World Trade Center 7, accordingly,

disproves the claim - which from the outset has been used to

justify the war in Afghanistan – that America was attacked on

9/11 by al-Qaeda Muslims. It suggests, instead, that 9/11 was a

false-flag operation to provide a pretext to attack Muslim

nations.

 

Conclusion

 

In any case, the official rationale for our presence in

Afghanistan is a lie. We are there for other reasons. Critics

have offered various suggestions as to the most important of

those reasons.110 Whatever be the answer to that question,

however, we have not been there to apprehend the terrorists

responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Besides never being legally

justified, therefore, the war in Afghanistan has never been

morally justified.

 

This war, moreover, is an abomination. In addition to the

thousands of US and other NATO troops who have been killed or

impaired for life, physically and/or mentally, the US-led

invasion/occupation of Afghanistan has resulted in a huge number

of Afghan casualties, with estimates running from several hundred

thousand to several million.111 But whatever the true number, the

fact is that the United States has produced a great amount of

death and misery – sometimes even bombing funerals and wedding

parties - in this country that had already suffered terribly and

that, even if the official story were true, had not attacked

America. The fact that the official story is a lie makes our war

crimes even worse.112

 

But there is a way out. As I have shown in this paper and even

more completely elsewhere,113 the falsity of the official account

of WTC 7 has now been demonstrated, leaving no room for

reasonable doubt. In his inaugural address, President Obama said,

“We will restore science to its rightful place,”114 thereby

pledging that in his administration, unlike that of his

predecessor, science would again be allowed to play a

determinative role in shaping public policy. By changing his

administration’s policy with regard to Afghanistan in light of

the science of WTC 7, the president would not only fulfill one of

his most important promises. He would also prevent the war in

Afghanistan from becoming known as “Obama’s Vietnam.”115

 

David Ray Griffin is the author of 36 books on various topics,

including philosophy, theology, philosophy of science, and 9/11.

His 2008 book, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the

Cover-Up, and the Exposé, was named a “Pick of the Week” by

Publishers Weekly. In September 2009, The New Statesman ranked

him #41 among “The 50 People Who Matter Today.” His most

recent book is The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7:

Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and

False (2009). His next book will be Cognitive Infiltration: An

Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

(September 2010). He wishes to thank Tod Fletcher, Jim Hoffman,

and Elizabeth Woodworth for help with this essay.

 

 

 

Notes

 

1 For a few of the many times this issue has been raised, see

Jeffrey T. Kuhner, “Obama's Vietnam?” Washington Times,

January 25, 2009

(http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/25/obamas-vietnam);

Juan Cole, “Obama’s Vietnam?” Salon.com, January 26, 2009

(http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/26/obama/print.html);

John Barry and Evan Thomas, “Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam,”

Newsweek, January 31, 2009 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/182650).

 

2 Marjorie Cohn, “Bombing of Afghanistan Is Illegal and Must Be

Stopped,” Jurist, November 6, 2001

(http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew36.htm).

 

3 Marjorie Cohn, “Afghanistan: The Other Illegal War,”

AlterNet, August 1, 2008

(http://www.alternet.org/world/93473/afghanistan:_the_other_illegal_war).

 

4 President Barack Obama, “The Way Forward 
in Afghanistan

and Pakistan,
” Remarks at the U.S. Military Academy at West

Point, December 1, 2009

(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34231058).

 

5 “Security Council Condemns, ‘In Strongest Terms,’

Terrorist Attacks on United States,” September 12, 2001

(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/SC7143.doc.htm).

 

6 Brian J. Foley "Legal Analysis: U.S. Campaign Against

Afghanistan Not Self-Defense Under International Law," Lawyers

Against the War

(http://www.lawyersagainstthewar.org/legalarticles/foley3.html).

 

7 "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which

shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or

which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States,

shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” US Constitution, Article

VI, par. 2.

 

8 See Richard Falk and Howard Friel, The Record of the Paper: How

the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (London: Verso,

2007).

 

9 Obama, “The Way Forward 
in Afghanistan and Pakistan
.”

 

10 For example, Robert H. Reid, writing for the Associated Press

(“August Deadliest Month for US in Afghanistan,” Associated

Press, August 29, 2009

[http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/august-deadliest-month-for-us-in-afghanistan]),

said the war “was launched by the Bush administration after the

Taliban government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden for his

role in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United

States.”

 

11 “White House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You,’”

CNN, September 21, 2001

(http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/09/21/ret.afghan.taliban).

 

12 David B. Ottaway and Joe Stephens, “Diplomats Met with

Taliban on Bin Laden,” Washington Post, October 29, 2001

(http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/US_met_taliban.htm).

 

13 “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer to Hand Bin Laden Over,”

Guardian, October 14, 2001

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5).

 

14 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Defends Strategy in

Afghanistan,” New York Times, August 18, 2009

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/us/politics/18vets.html?_r=1&th&emc=th).

 

15 See the two chapters entitled “The New Great Game” in

Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in

Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), and Steve

Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and

bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New

York: Penguin, 2004).

 

16 Rashid, Taliban, 75-79, 163, 175.

 

17 Quoted in Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié,

Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed

Hunt for Bin Laden (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation

Books, 2002), 43. 

 

18 George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC

News, September 18, 2001

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm).

 

19 “Meet the Press,” NBC, September 23, 2001

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/nbctext092301.html).

 

20 “Remarks by the President, Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill

and Secretary of State Powell on Executive Order,” White House,

September 24, 2001

(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/president_026.asp).

 

21 Seymour M. Hersh, “What Went Wrong: The C.I.A. and the

Failure of American Intelligence,” New Yorker, October 1, 2001

(http://web.archive.org/web/20020603150854/http://www.cicentre.com/Documents/DOC_Hersch_OCT_01.htm).

 

22 Office of the Prime Minister, “Responsibility for the

Terrorist Atrocities in the United States,” BBC News, October

4, 2001

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1579043.stm).

 

23 “The Investigation and the Evidence,” BBC News, October 5,

2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1581063.stm).

 

24 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Most Wanted Terrorists:

Usama bin Laden”

(http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorists/terbinladen.htm).

 

25 Ed Haas, “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden

to 9/11’” Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006

(http://web.archive.org/web/20061107114035/http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html).

For more on this episode, see David Ray Griffin, 9/11

Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press

(Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink], 2008), Chap. 18.

 

26 See The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National

Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,

Authorized Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), Chap. 5, notes

16, 41, and 92.

 

27 Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, with Benjamin Rhodes,

Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 118.

 

28 Ibid., 122-24.

 

29 Ibid., 119.

 

30 David Ray Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?

(Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2009), 27-29.

 

31 Professor Bruce Lawrence interviewed by Kevin Barrett,

February 16, 2007

(http://www.radiodujour.com/people/lawrence_bruce).

 

32 Griffin, Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive? 16, 29-33.

 

33 Kevin Fagan, “Agents of Terror Leave Their Mark on Sin

City,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 4, 2001

(http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/04/MN102970.DTL).

 

34 The 9/11 Commission Report, 160.

 

35 “Professor Dittmar Machule,” Interviewed by Liz Jackson, A

Mission to Die For, Four Corners, October 18, 2001

(http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/interviews/machule.htm).

 

36 Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball, “Bush: ‘We’re at War,”

Newsweek, September 24, 2001 (http://www.newsweek.com/id/76065).

 

37 Daniel Hopsicker, Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta and the

9-11 Cover-Up in Florida (Eugene, OR: MadCow Press, 2004). See

also Hopsicker, “The Secret World of Mohamed Atta: An Interview

With Atta’s American Girlfriend,” InformationLiberation,

August 20, 2006 (http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=14738).

 Many of the details are summarized in my 9/11 Contradictions,

Chap. 15, “Were Mohamed Atta and the Other Hijackers Devout

Muslims?” As I explain in that chapter, there were efforts to

try to discredit Keller’s account by intimidating her into

recanting and by claiming that she lived with a different man

having the same first name, but these attempts failed. 

 

38 “Professor Dittmar Machule.”

 

39 Kate Connolly, “Father Insists Alleged Leader Is Still

Alive,” Guardian, September 2, 2002

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/02/september11.usa).

 

40 “Photographs Taken of Mohamed Atta during His University

Years,” A Mission to Die For, Four Corners

(http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/resources/photos/university.htm).

Also, the differences between the (bearded) Atta in his passport

photo, which is in the FBI’s evidence for the Moussaoui trial,

and the Atta of the standard FBI photo, seem greater than can be

accounted for by the fact that only the former Atta is bearded.

The two photos can be compared at 911Review

(http://911review.org/JohnDoe2/Atta.html).

 

41 “Professor Dittmar Machule.”

 

42 Thomas Tobin, “Florida: Terror’s Launching Pad,” St.

Petersburg Times, September 1, 2002

(http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/01/911/Florida__terror_s_lau.shtml);

Elaine Allen-Emrich, “Hurt for Terrorists Reaches North

Port,” Charlotte Sun-Herald, September 14, 2001 (available at

http://www.madcowprod.com/keller.htm).

 

43 Connolly, “Father Insists Alleged Leader Is Still Alive.”

 

44 David Bamford, “Hijack ‘Suspect’ Alive in Morocco,”

BBC, September 22, 2001

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1558669.stm).

Although some news organizations, including the BBC itself, later

tried to debunk this story, they failed, as I reported in The New

Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé

(Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 151-53.

 

45 See Jay Kolar, “What We Now Know about the Alleged 9-11

Hijackers,” in Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11

(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 3-44, at 22-26; and Paul

Thompson, “The Two Ziad Jarrahs,” History Commons

(http://www.historycommons.org/essay.jsp?article=essayjarrah).

 

46 For types of evidence not discussed here, see Griffin, The New

Pearl Harbor Revisited, Chap. 8, “9/11 Commission Falsehoods

about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Pakistanis, and Saudis.”

 

47 “Ashcroft Says More Attacks May Be Planned,” CNN,

September 18, 2001

(http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/inv.investigation.terrorism/index.html);

“Terrorist Hunt,” ABC News, September 12, 2001

(http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/abc_hunt.html).

 

48 Anne Karpf, “Uncle Sam’s Lucky Finds,” Guardian, March

19, 2002

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,669961,00.html).

Like some others, this article mistakenly said the passport

belonged to Mohamed Atta.

 

49 Statement by Susan Ginsburg, senior counsel to the 9/11

Commission, at the 9/11 Commission Hearing, January 26, 2004

(http://www.9-11commission.gov/archive/hearing7/9-11Commission_Hearing_2004-01-26.htm).

The Commission’s account reflected a CBS report that the

passport had been found “minutes after” the attack, which had

been stated by the Associated Press, January 27, 2003. 

 

50 A. K. Dewdney, “The Cellphone and Airfone Calls from Flight

UA93,” Physics 911, June 9, 2003

(http://physics911.net/cellphoneflight93.htm); Michel

Chossudovsky, “More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell

Phone Calls,” Global Research, August 10, 2004

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO408B.html). For

discussion of this issue, see Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor

Revisited, 112-14.

 

51 Greg Gordon, “Prosecutors Play Flight 93 Cockpit

Recording,” McClatchy Newspapers, KnoxNews.com, April 12, 2006

(http://web.archive.org/web/20080129210016/http://www.knoxsingles.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MOUSSAOUI-04-12-06&cat=WW).

 

52 United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054

(http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html).

These documents can be viewed more easily in “Detailed Account

of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights”

(http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

 

53 “Interview with Deena Lynne Burnett (re: phone call from

hijacked flight),” 9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents,

Chronological, September 11, 2001, Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008

(http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).

 

54 William M. Arkin, “When Seeing and Hearing Isn't

Believing,” Washington Post, February 1, 1999

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm).

For discussion, see Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited,

114-18.

 

55 FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” 9/11

Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11,

2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008,

(http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).

 

56 “America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King

Live, CNN, September 14, 2001

(http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).

 

57 See David Ray Griffin and Rob Balsamo, “Could Barbara Olson

Have Made Those Calls? An Analysis of New Evidence about Onboard

Phones,” Pilots for 9/11 Truth, June 26, 2007

(http://pilotsfor911truth.org/amrarticle.html).

 

58 See the graphic in Jim Hoffman’s “Detailed Account of

Telephone Calls from September 11th Flights,” Flight 77

(http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).

 

59 For claims about hijackers’ names on the flight manifests,

see Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War

on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 13; George Tenet, At the

Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York:

HarperCollins, 2007), 167-69; and my discussion in Griffin, The

New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 174-75. On claims about hijacker

names on the Pentagon autopsy report, see Debunking 9/11 Myths:

Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts: An

In-Depth Investigation by Popular Mechanics, ed. David Dunbar and

Brad Reagan (New York: Hearst Books, 2006), 63, and my discussion

of its claim in David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An

Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official

Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books],

2007], 267-69.

 

60 See Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 163, 174-75.

 

61 Thomas R. Olmsted, M.D. “Still No Arabs on Flight 77,”

Rense.com, June 23, 2003 (http://www.rense.com/general38/77.htm).

 

62 See The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 275-79.

 

63 See David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth behind

9/11 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), Chap. 1, “9/11

and Prior False Flag Operations.”

 

64 General Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism,

and the American Empire (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 120,

130; “Gen. Wesley Clark Weights Presidential Bid: ‘I Think

about It Everyday,’” Democracy Now! March 2, 2007

(http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/02/1440234);

Joe Conason, “Seven Countries in Five Years,” Salon.com,

October 12, 2007

(http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/10/12/wesley_clark);

Gareth Porter, “Yes, the Pentagon Did Want to Hit Iran,” Asia

Times, May 7, 2008

(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE07Ak01.html).

 

65 David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade

Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is

Unscientific and False (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink

Books], 2009).

 

66 James Glanz, “Engineers Have a Culprit in the Strange

Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: Diesel Fuel,” New York Times,

November 29, 2001

(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/29/nyregion/nation-challenged-site-engineers-have-culprit-strange-collapse-7-world-trade.html).

 

67 See FEMA, “High-Rise Office Building Fire, One Meridian

Plaza, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”

(http://www.interfire.org/res_file/pdf/Tr-049.pdf), and “Fire

Practically Destroys Venezuela’s Tallest Building,” Venezuela

News, Views, and Analysis, October 18, 2004

(http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/741).

 

68 See FEMA, World Trade Center Building Performance Study

(http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf), Chap. 5, Sect.

6.2, “Probable Collapse Sequence,” at p. 31. 

 

69 Rather’s statement is available on YouTube

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvx904dAw0o). 

 

70 See “Danny Jowenko on WTC 7 Controlled Demolition,”

YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=877gr6xtQIc), or, for

more of the interview, “Jowenko WTC 7 Demolition Interviews,”

in three parts

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DRhwRN06I&feature=related).

 

71 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

(http://www.ae911truth.org).

 

72 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Structural Fire Response and Probable

Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7, November

2008, Vol. 1

(wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201-9%20Vol%201.pdf), 330.

 

73 “NIST Whistleblower,” October 1, 2007

(http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2007/10/former-nist-employee-blows-whistle.html).

 

74 Shyam Sunder, “Opening Statement,” NIST Press Briefing,

August 21, 2008

(http://wtc.nist.gov/media/opening_remarks_082108.html).

 

75 Quoted in “Report: Fire, Not Bombs, Leveled WTC 7

Building,” USA Today, August 21, 2008

(http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-21-wtc-nist_N.htm).

 

76 New Research Misconduct Policies, section headed “What is

Research Misconduct?” National Science Foundation, Office of

Inspector General (http://www.nsf.gov/oig/session.pdf). This

document is undated, but internal evidence suggests that it was

published in 2001.

 

77 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 1: 324.

 

78 Quoted in Chris Bull and Sam Erman, eds., At Ground Zero:

Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories (New York:

Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 97.

 

79 Joan Killough-Miller, “The ‘Deep Mystery’ of Melted

Steel,” WPI Transformations, Spring 2002 

(http://www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2002Spring/steel.html).

 

80 James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “A Search for Clues in

Towers’ Collapse,” New York Times, February 2, 2002

(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/nyregion/search-for-clues-towers-collapse-engineers-volunteer-examine-steel-debris-taken.html).

 

81 Jonathan Barnett, Ronald R. Biederman, and Richard D. Sisson,

Jr., “Limited Metallurgical Examination,” FEMA, World Trade

Center Building Performance Study, May 2002, Appendix C

(http://wtc.nist.gov/media/AppendixC-fema403_apc.pdf), C-13.

 

82 “Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7

Investigation,” NIST, August 21, 2008, updated April 21, 2009).

NIST has removed both versions of this document from its website,

but Jim Hoffman’s website has preserved both the original

(2008) version

(http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/nist/wtc_qa_082108.html) and

the updated (2009) version

(http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/nist/wtc_qa_042109.html).

 

83 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature,” Expert Report, May

2004

(http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTCDustSignature_ExpertReport.051304.1646.mp.pdf),

11.

 

84 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature Study: Composition and

Morphology,” December 2003

(http://www.nyenvirolaw.org/WTC/130%20Liberty%20Street/Mike%20Davis%20LMDC%20130%20Liberty%20Documents/Signature%20of%20WTC%20dust/WTC%20Dust%20Signature.Composition%20and%20Morphology.Final.pdf),

17. This earlier (2003) version of the RJ Lee report contained

much more information about melted iron than the 2004 version.

For discussion, see Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse, 40-42.

 

85 RJ Lee Group, “WTC Dust Signature Study” (2003), 21.

 

86 WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web

(http://www.webelements.com/lead/physics.html).

 

87 Steven E. Jones et al., "Extremely High Temperatures during

the World Trade Center Destruction," Journal of 9/11 Studies,

January 2008

(http://journalof911studies.com/articles/WTCHighTemp2.pdf), 4-5.

 

88 WebElements: The Periodic Table on the Web

(http://www.webelements.com/molybdenum/physics.html).

 

89 Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R.

Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R.

Gourley, and Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material

Observed in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,”

The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2: 7-31

(http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm).

 

90 Jennifer Abel, “Theories of 9/11,” Hartford Advocate,

January 29, 2008 (http://www.ae911truth.org/press/23).

 

91 See The Mysterious Collapse, 150-55.

 

92 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 1: 346.

 

93 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Structural Fire Response and Probable

Collapse Sequence of World Trade Center Building 7, November

2008, Vol. 2

(http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201-9%20Vol%202.pdf),

462.

 

94 For documentation and discussion of NIST’s claim about the

lack of girder shear studs, see Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse,

212-15.

 

95 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 2: 384, Figure 9-11.

 

96 Interim Report on WTC 7, NIST, June 2004

(http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june04/appendixl.pdf), L-26.

This contradiction is pointed out in a video, “NIST Report on

WTC7 Debunked and Exposed!” YouTube, December 28, 2008

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFpbZ-aLDLY), at 0:45 to 1:57.

 

97 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Draft for Public Comment, Vol. 2

(http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NIST_NCSTAR_1-9_vol2_for_public_comment.pdf),

595.

 

98 “WTC 7 Technical Briefing” (video), NIST, August 26, 2008,

at 1:03. NIST has removed this video and the accompanying

transcript from the Internet. However, Nate Flach has made the

video available at Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/11941571), and the

transcript, entitled “NIST Technical Briefing on Its Final

Draft Report on WTC 7 for Public Comment,” is available at

David Chandler’s website

(http://911speakout.org/NIST_Tech_Briefing_Transcript.pdf).

 

99 Ibid., at 1:01:45.

 

100 David Chandler, “WTC7 in Freefall - No Longer

Controversial,” September 4, 2008

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I), at 2:45.

 

101 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Vol. 2: 607.

 

102 Chandler, “WTC7 in Freefall – No Longer Controversial,”

at 3:27.

 

103 “Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7

Investigation.”

 

104 NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Draft for Public Comment, Vol. 2: 595-96,

596, 610.

 

105 Symposium on State Crimes Against Democracy, American

Behavioral Scientist 53 (February 2010): 783-939

(http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6).

 

106 Matthew T. Witt, “Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing

to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs

Scholarship,” American Behavioral Scientist 53 (February 2010):

921-39 (http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6), at 935.

 

107 “The Myth of Implosion”

(http://www.implosionworld.com/dyk2.html). 

 

108 See Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, 30-31.

 

109 As to how domestic terrorists could have gotten access, an

answer becomes possible if we are aware that Larry Silverstein,

who owned Building 7 and had recently taken out a lease on the

rest of the World Trade Center, stood to make several billion

dollars if it was destroyed in a terrorist attack, and that a

brother and cousin of George W. Bush were principals of a company

that handled security for the World Trade Center (Griffin,

Debunking 9/11 Debunking, 111).

 

110 Some have seen drug profits as central. Others have focused

on access to oil, natural gas, and minerals. For example,

economist Michel Chossudovsky, referring to the allegedly recent

discovery of huge reserves of minerals and natural gas in

Afghanistan, wrote: “The issue of ‘previously unknown

deposits’ sustains a falsehood. It excludes Afghanistan's vast

mineral wealth as a justifiable casus belli. It says that the

Pentagon only recently became aware that Afghanistan was among

the World's most wealthy mineral economies . . . [whereas in

reality] all this information was known in minute detail”

(Michel Chossudovsky, “’The War is Worth Waging’:

Afghanistan's Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas: The War

on Afghanistan is a Profit Driven ‘Resource War,’” Global

Research, June 17, 2010

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19769).

 

111 Dr. Gideon Polya, author of Body Count: Global Avoidable

Mortality Since 1950, has estimated that there over four million

Afghanis have died since the 2001 than would have died without

the invasion; see “January 2010 – 4.5 Million Dead in Afghan

Holocaust, Afghan Genocide,” January 2, 2010, Afghan Holocaust,

Afghan Genocide (http://afghangenocide.blogspot.com).

 

112 On US-NATO war crimes in Afghanistan, see Marc W. Herold,

“Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to ‘Save

our Troops’: Eight Years of Horror Perpetrated against the

People of Afghanistan,” Global Research, October 15, 2009

(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15665).

 

113 See The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7, and,

more recently, “Building What? How SCADs Can Be Hidden in Plain

Sight,” 911Truth.org, May 27, 2010

(http://911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).

 

114 “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” New York Times,

January 20, 2009

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html).

 

115 I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodwor