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Everyone knows what happened in Manhattan on 11 September 2001. Everyone remembers where they were when nineteen members of Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airlines and used them in a suicide mission to strike right at the heart of the United States. Two planes were used to attack the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, another hit the Pentagon at Arlington in Virginia, and flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We know all this because we watched it unfold live on television sets all around the world. We know all of this happened because we watched it on the news and we listened to the news anchors and correspondents describing the events as they happened.
Ever since the terror attacks in New York so-called 9/11 Truth conspiracies have abounded, and we have known them to be just that – conspiracy theories – because we saw what happened. Like hundreds of millions of people around the world I was there, I was tuned in to the Irish news as it broadcast live images of thick black plumes of smoke pouring from the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, and we all saw United Airlines flight 175 hit the South Tower. Our memory of these events and the reports from the media form the basis of the facts we accept – the truth of what actually took place.
On the basis of what we know we have spent a decade and a half poo-pooing the quack internet conspiracy theorists, and we have certainly agreed with British Prime Minister David Cameron’s assessment that what lies behind these “Zionist plot” theories is a thinly veiled antisemitism. On such things truth is established. However much we adhere to the established truth – or the narrative – of 11 September 2001 there are some elements of these events that call into question the entire house of cards. In no way will it be suggested here that “the Jews,” “Zionists,” or even the US secret services were behind the attacks. All that will be pointed out is the incredible improbability of so many buildings collapsing vertically downwards due to “structural failure” and the fact that one building’s collapse (the Salomon Brothers’ Building) was reported by CNN, Fox News, and the BBC almost a half hour before it collapsed. Firstly, and from an engineering standpoint, it is very difficult to make any high building fall vertically:
Sometimes, though, a building is surrounded by structures that must be preserved. In this case, the blasters proceed with a true implosion, demolishing the building so that it collapses straight down into its own footprint (the total area at the base of the building). This feat requires such skill that only a handful of demolition companies in the world will attempt it.
Tom Harris, Science Writer at How Stuff Works
What we all know is that these buildings fell straight down into their footprint, an engineering demolition feet of remarkable skill. Not one of them, but all of them. A growing number of independent experts and academics are conceding that it is unlikely in the extreme that the impact of a plane and the burning of jet fuel could have inflicted the damage and caused the heat for this to have happened. One perhaps would be considered a fluke, every building – even those not struck by an aircraft – doing the same thing is vastly improbable. Yet we saw it with our own eyes.
What we also saw with our own eyes, what has been effectively hidden in plain view, was the world’s media reporting the collapse of WTC 7 – the Salomon Building – over twenty minutes before the building collapsed. In fact, in numerous live reports from various news networks, the report of its collapse was being reported with live images showing the building still standing. We can’t come to any conclusions here without becoming ourselves conspiracists. All that we can do is present the information, the facts, as they come to us. We are left with only a handful of alternatives; either the news networks – on the biggest news day in modern history – were using archive video from earlier in the day, or they were clairvoyant, or they were being fed the news by a person or persons unknown.
Random Public Journal 