In the July 1 issue I mentioned that I attended in June of this year the “Vancouver 9/11 Hearings” and would report on them in September. There were two major reasons for the delay. Since the Toronto Hearings had preceded Vancouver and the latter were to some extent a response to them, they needed to be covered first. In addition, the Vancouver speakers were supposed to have submitted their presentations to the judges by August 1 which would then give me time to work from written material rather than merely the rather scanty notes I had made at the time. The Toronto material was indeed presented on August 1 but the hope that complete Vancouver data would become available during that month was only partially fulfilled and the judges, therefore, extended the deadline to September 1. Rather than waiting any longer I shall now present my impressions, which will convey the essence.

          As mentioned in previous installments the 9/11 Truth movement is not monolithic. It consists of a wide variety of people from diverse backgrounds and educational levels who are united only by the belief that our government has not told us the full truth about what happened on that fateful day. The hallmark is individualism rather than conformity and, as such, exhibits the spirit of America’s frontier days. There is the neighborliness of kindred thoughts but also the rowdiness of “my way or the highway.” Since whatever minimal organization exists comes from the bottom up rather than the top down one should not expect any kind of uniformity. This is important to know because it also means that there is no funding agency which can then enforce its demands. Furthermore, whatever opinions a given individual may utter they need to be regarded strictly as personal, with the only backing: the integrity of the individual.

          Nevertheless, as mentioned on previous occasions, two major groups have crystallized over the years which differ in their outlook how the common goal, namely an impartial, politically independent, legally constituted, inquiry into the events of 9/11, can be achieved. One group limits itself to acquainting the public with the fact that major portions of the data of the 9/11 Commission Report do not appear to be scientifically sustainable. The other looks at: who had the motive, means and opportunity, to commit this dastardly crime? Both are legitimate approaches but since human beings are involved, with considerable differences in temperament, acrimony exists not only between but also within these groups. This is readily apparent when one looks at some comments on 9/11 Internet sites and it came into full bloom on the last day of the Vancouver Hearings.

          Although, as mentioned, there is no official leadership the, what one may call, “who done it?” group is largely represented by James Fetzer Ph.D. whose credentials I have previously mentioned. He was not invited to speak at the Toronto Hearings because this was the forum for the “how what was done” and he felt that this limitation needed to be corrected. Specifically: the Toronto Hearings dealt only briefly with the Pentagon attack and omitted altogether the “no  plane theories” as well as the potential role of our and Israel’s government in the disaster. The Vancouver Hearings were designed to overcome the latter deficiency under his Chairmanship and that of Joshua Blakeney, a graduate student from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Since my personal preference is geared towards facts rather than speculations, which by their very nature are not amenable to proof, I was hesitant to attend but since Dr. Griffin had encouraged me because I “might meet some good people,” I went.

          In contrast to Toronto, where the venue was on a university campus the Vancouver Hearings were held in a movie theater which had, however, the advantage of the hotel being next door. There were 19 speakers scheduled for sessions on Friday evening, all day Saturday as well as the evening and all day Sunday. The program can be viewed on http://www.911vancouverhearings.com. The meeting was to start at 6 p.m. on Friday evening and I thought that with my plane arriving from Salt Lake at 4 p.m. I would have time to have dinner with former Navy Commander Ted Muga and his wife whom Griffin had urged me to meet. Since Commander Muga had in his younger years landed fighter jets on aircraft carriers, and had subsequently flown for Pan Am, I thought he would be a good source to enlighten me about the ease with which with the hijackers were supposed to have achieved their objective.

          As it turned out my flight did not leave Salt Lake until 6 p.m. (Vancouver time 5 p.m.) so I had to cancel dinner and told the Mugas I would meet them at the Hearings. This is not necessarily irrelevant because it reminded me what Griffin had told the audience in regard to his experience on the flight to Toronto, which had likewise been delayed by more than hour. He pointed out at that time that Mohamed Atta, the leader and chief hijacker, who allegedly flew AA 11 into the North Tower had, according to the 9/11 Commission, driven on September 10 from Boston to Portland Maine. He stayed at a Comfort Inn overnight, then left the car with incriminating evidence at the jetport and took a 6 a.m. flight back to Boston to board AA 11 which was supposed to have taken off at 7:45, but the actual departure was delayed to 7:59. Although he made it in time his luggage, which contained further incriminating evidence including his will, did not. Since airline delays are common we can now ask ourselves: why would someone risk ruining one’s major mission in life, if that’s what it was, on the chance that the Portland plane might be delayed? Furthermore, assuming that Atta wanted his luggage on AA11, why carry one’s last will and testament on a suicide mission where it would be burnt to cinders? But these are just some of the questions one is not supposed to think about.

          As it turned out I had not missed anything as far as the Keynote address was concerned. When I arrived at the theatre, having skipped dinner, I saw what appeared to be a somewhat elderly rather agitated hippie on the stage addressing the audience in what is best described as a rant. I had no idea what he was trying to tell us but he was indefatigable. The program informed us that he goes under the name of “Splitting the Sky,” had attempted a citizen’s arrest of President George W. Bush in Calgary in 2009, was near the Twin Towers the day before 9/11, had participated in the Attica Prison Rebellion and has become a staunch advocate for the marginalized and the dispossessed. Eventually he did give up the podium and the scheduled presentations could start. Obviously he was a well-meaning person but the delivery of his message was not conducive to making converts from unbelievers.

          In accordance with the title “Hearings,” the format was quasi-judicial. There were two judges (one male, the other female) who were supposed to listen to the evidence presented by the speakers – witnesses, and eventually decide whether or not certain persons in the US had engaged in criminal conduct as part of the 9/11 tragedy. To this end Judge Alfred Lebremont Webre administered an oath to each of the witnesses at the time of their speech that they would “present the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth.” In addition the witnesses had to declare what qualifications they had in regard to the topic they were about to address and to conclude with names of persons of interest who should be subjected to a judicial inquest. Although this sounds rather respectable it in no way guarantees that unbiased actionable evidence will be forthcoming. I am convinced that all of the witnesses presented their information in good faith and to the best of their knowledge. But since there was no cross-examination and presenters had in addition, for the most part, only second hand data, of, at times, questionable reliability, this format is not necessarily conducive to ascertain actionable facts. There is an additional aspect to witness testimony which holds even for legally constituted proceedings. Witnesses in general do not lie, but they have their bias which they at times hold to a fanatical degree because it is their subjective truth. I have discussed this aspect in other contexts on this site and it will become especially pertinent in regard to one of the potentially most important talks of the hearings.   

          The presentations themselves can be mainly be grouped under: means of the Twin Towers’ destruction; what happened at the Pentagon; faking of video evidence in regard to the plane impacts; the hijacked passengers; culpability of  government circles here and/or in Israel and one or two miscellaneous items. I shall not discuss all of them but limit myself to merely a few which provided, at least for me, new information. As far as the Twin Towers are concerned Charles Boldwyn, a retired physics and chemistry teacher, explained that the steel columns which held up the buildings were tapered, as had also been mentioned in Toronto. Since the lightest material was on top and the heaviest on the bottom it does not make good sense that the buildings should have fallen down in the way they did. Lighter mass cannot completely destroy a heavier one. In Toronto the top of the building was compared with a VW beetle which was supposed to have crushed the Mack truck underneath.

Jeff Prager was scheduled to present data which indicated that nuclear charges had been involved in the destruction of the buildings but since he could not come the presentation was given by Donald Fox who added his own material. In essence: the US Geological Service had found tritium and deuterium, which are nuclear fission products, in ground zero basement water as well as other fission byproducts in the dust which covered lower Manhattan. A full exposition of Prager’s ideas can be found on his e-book America Nuked.  

          On basis of the book, “Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of directed free-energy technology,” Dr. Judy Wood had been invited to present her thesis but she didn’t come and the paper was given by Ms. Clare Kuehn. Regardless of the validity of the Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) theory the book contains excellent photographs which are worthwhile pondering in relation to the explanatory value of the government’s collapse model.

          In as much as there are at present, apart from the official explanation, essentially four theories how the collapse of the Twin Towers could have come about Mr. Dwain Deets tried to approach the problem scientifically by examining each one in relation to the major known observations from ground zero. Mr. Deets has an interesting scientific background with an MS degree in physics as well as one in engineering. He worked for many years in a research capacity at NASA and in 1996 was appointed Director, Aerospace Projects Office at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA. His NASA career is documented at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/NewsReleases/1996/96-10.html. In the 1970s he published work on prototypes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which then evolved, via Global Hawk, to the current Predator. As such, he is a person who deserves to be listened to. Being a scientist he was not concerned with value judgments as to which collapse theories are legitimate and which ones off the pale this is why he included: ROOSD, nanothermite, DEW and mini-nukes.

          Like most everybody else I had not heard of the ROOSD model (Runaway Open Office Spaces Destruction) before but Deets explained that the fundamental idea is:     

“If the OOS [open office space] portion of the originating floor is ‘separated’ from the columns, it will drop unimpeded to the floor below. This separation could be [achieved] by carefully placed cutter charges, or by a more dramatic displacement of the upper block of floors laterally, such that one side of the upper facade drops free of the row of columns below. This could ‘strip away’ the first several floors below serving the same effect of ‘separating’ the floors from their supporting columns. The floor below, not designed to arrest this fall, will join in a runaway cascade of OOS floors to the bottom, known technically as a progressive floor collapse.”

Mind you, Mr. Deets did not invent any of these four theories he merely evaluated them within certain parameters which included: Crush rates; Debris patterns; Nano-thermite; Temperatures (immediate); Persistent heat; Vehicle anomalies; Tritium; Basement blasts; Radionuclides. He then created a rating scale and scoring system as to which one of the four theories would correspond best to observed data. Based on this limited material mini-nukes achieved the highest probability of having been involved in the destruction of the towers. Deets emphasized that this should not be taken as the final word but merely as an example for how the scientific method can be used to assess explanatory probabilities for a given event.

Three speakers dealt specifically with aspects of the attack on the Pentagon. Enver Masud, an engineer by profession, who has also written 9/11 Unveiled which can be downloaded from the Internet, showed a video clip from the morning of 9/11 where Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent stood in front of the building and stated: "From my close up inspection there's no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. . . .  The only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you could 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. If you look at the pictures of the Pentagon you see that all of the floors have collapsed, that didn't happen immediately. It wasn't till almost 45 minutes later that the structure was weakened enough that all of the floors collapsed." This clip was subsequently withdrawn from the CNN website but exists on YouTube. Jamie McIntyre stated years later that his words had been quoted out of context but this is hardly credible because the absence of debris from a Boeing 757 has been commented upon also by other credible witnesses. Masud mentioned furthermore that:

“In January 2003, the U.S. government's National Institute of Standards and Technology released the ‘Pentagon Building Performance Report’ (removed from NIST website). Page 35 of this report reads: ‘An examination of the area encompassed by extending the line of travel of the aircraft to the face of the building shows that there are no discrete marks on the building corresponding to the positions of the outer third of the right wing. The size and position of the actual opening in the facade of the building (from column line 8 to column line 18) indicate that no portion of the outer two-thirds of the right wing and no portion of the outer one-third of the left wing actually entered the building.’”

                Barbara Honegger, whose contribution to the topic has been mentioned in part in the August 1 issue provided a very detailed .ppt presentation which demonstrated that the AA77 flight pattern as described by the government does not conform to observed facts and that the first blast at the Pentagon occurred not with the officially reported impact at 9:37 a.m., because clocks at the helipad and inside the Pentagon stopped at 9:32. Debris corresponding to those from a small plane, possibly a Global Hawk, was found not in the area of the supposed Boeing impact but further north by the helipad and there were numerous credible reports from witnesses of bombs having gone off inside the building.

          Dennis Cimino, who used to be a Navy Command System specialist and was involved in Flight Data Recorder (FDR) testing, reported in detail on the problems associated with the supposed flight pattern of AA77. To me the most interesting aspect was his analysis of the AA77 FDR. It revealed that there could not have been a struggle in the cockpit because at no time was the autopilot disengaged which would have inevitably happened under those circumstances. Furthermore, the preamble of the FDR file, which normally carries identifying information of the plane it came from, had 000. This indicated that the file did not originate from AA77. For the sake of accuracy I need to mention, however, that I have subsequently found on the Internet a critique, by Frank Legge Ph.D., of Cimino’s report which had originally been published with Jim Fetzer in Veteran’s Today. It was subsequently withdrawn from that site but can be retrieved from others.

          I shall now skip the other presentations and go to that of Ms. Susan Lindauer’s “Confessions of a CIA Asset.” If what she said is correct, all previous major scandals would pale in comparison. I had read Ms. Lindauer’s book Extreme Prejudice – The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq The Ultimate Conspiracy to Silence Truth, and was interested to personally evaluate her credibility. At the Hearings she made the following statements under oath: As a CIA asset she had been a back-channel liaison to the Libyans and Iraqis at the UN and her “handler” was Dr. Richard Fuisz. In the middle of April 2001 she was told by Dr. Fuisz to confront the Libyans and Iraqis with the demand to hand over any intelligence they have in regard to conspiracies involving airplane hijackings and/or airplane bombings. They were also to be told that if they would not produce this evidence and any such attack were to occur, their countries would suffer severe military retaliations. Ms. Lindauer relayed the message but not the threat upon which Dr. Fuisz became furious and insisted that the threat had to be delivered in unmistakable terms. He also insisted that the Iraqis and Libyans be informed that “Those threats originate from the highest levels of government, above the CIA Director and the Secretary of State.” She delivered the message but neither the Iraqis nor the Libyans had any information. During June the emphasis shifted only to Iraq and it was felt that the WTC would be the target because “it would finish the cycle which had started in 1993.” Baghdad wanted to cooperate and offered to accept FBI operatives into their country to check for jihadists. The offer was not taken up. Although it was known by the CIA that an attack was imminent, precise information as to airports of origin and flight numbers was missing. “9/11 was not the result of mistakes. It was a deliberate execution. Though 90 per cent of U.S. intelligence tried to stop the attack, the compartmentalized structure of the intelligence community made it possible for a minority 10 percent to undercut all the good work and proactive planning.”

After 9/11 she continued contacts with the Iraqis in order to forestall the impending war but was thwarted by the administration. After the invasion she informed members of Congress and the administration about the war’s false pretenses but was arrested and charged with spying for Iraq in 2004. Since she insisted upon her innocence she was declared mentally ill and imprisoned in a military facility. She was to be forcibly drugged to cure her so that she could stand trial, but she refused the medications. She insisted that her statements regarding the impending attack were verified by a Canadian friend, Parke Godfrey a professor of computer sciences, who was in Washington in those days.  

She did not mention that she was released from prison in 2006, but declared mentally incompetent to stand trial and that in 2009 all charges were dropped. What are we to make of testimony of this type? The prison episode is objectively verified but how are we to assess the claims that the highest levels of the Bush administration facilitated 9/11 in order to allow the Iraq war to go forward? There is no doubt that what she testified to was her subjective truth but was it “the” truth and is it verifiable? I tried to get a personal feeling of her current mental state by inviting her for dinner but the meeting dragged on and by the time I got back to the hotel she had left her room and could no longer be reached. It is easy to write her testimony off as “delusions of grandeur” and she may well have overemphasized her role in the scheme of things. But there is by now considerable evidence that 9/11 was not merely an “intelligence failure” and that the Iraq war was a top priority for the Bush administration immediately after the inauguration.

I shall forgo for now a discussion of the other presentations and refer the reader to a succinct summary by Craig McKee who captured the essence on http://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/911-vancouver-hearings. Instead I shall present two personal encounters. I had read Webster Tarpley’s book Synthetic Terror Made in USA and was eager to engage him in conversation. I told him that “the Bush administration may well have allowed some type of attack to happen, but underestimated its magnitude, similar to the original Pearl Harbor when Roosevelt baited the Japanese to fire the first shot.” This immediately released a torrent of anger. He told me in no uncertain terms that Roosevelt was a great man who saved Western civilization and that I am undoing years of work with my LIHOP suggestion (Let It Happen on Purpose), when it was really MIHOP (Make It Happen on Purpose). Since it was obvious that I was confronted with dogma there was no purpose in continuing the conversation.

          The other one was a brief conversation with Judge Webre about where these Hearings might lead and he thought that eventually it might go to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The program had told us that the judge was on the “Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal” and since I had not heard of it previously I looked it up after returning home. Wikipedia tells us that this is a Malaysian organization established in 2007 by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad to investigate war crimes. It was to be an alternative to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which Mahathir accused of bias in its selection of cases to cover. The tribunal does not have a UN mandate or recognition, no power to order arrests or impose sentences, and it is unclear that its verdicts have any but symbolic significance.

Nevertheless, in May 2012 after hearing testimony for a week from victims of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the tribunal unanimously convicted in absentia former President Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Assistant Attorneys General John Yoo and Jay Bybee, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and former counselors David Addington and William Haynes II of conspiracy to commit war crimes, specifically torture. The tribunal referred their findings to the chief prosecutor at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

It seems doubtful to me that the Court will take the case but this seems to be the model upon which a 9/11 investigation could be built. On the other hand even if The Hague International Criminal Court were to hear these cases it would have only moral impact here because “American exceptionalism” does not recognize international jurisdiction over its citizens.

In sum and substance I came away from the meeting with the conviction that the 9/11 Truth community still has a long way to go before it will achieve general acceptance, but that with good will progress can and will be made toward uncovering this enormous crime. In view of the tremendous importance of this topic for the future of our country, and the world, further discussions of specific aspects will appear in subsequent installments.