9/11 Material Released in Response to Executive Order 14040
vault.fbi.gov
vault.fbi.gov
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/09/2021-19... - the text of Executive Order 14040
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi-releases-first-911-docu... - mostly it sounds like this first piece is about connections to Saudi Arabia? And that it essentially says "this was not an official Saudi action"?
https://www.kezi.com/content/news/575294492.html or at least that's the summary I get from a statement from "9/11 Families United", connecting dots through these redactions is not a skill I have.
There is only one document in there at present; Order 14040 suggests there should be more showing up in the next six months, with a chunk of stuff required to be up by 60 days after the date of the order (which was the 9th), another, larger chunk by 120 days after, and even more by 180 days after. So if you are interested in seeing how much the FBI is willing to let you see of what they discovered (assuming none of these documents are actually disinformation) then you probably want to make one of your systems check this URL regularly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailblazer_Project
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_Greenhouse
Goto controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airst...
"Commission staff believes there is sufficient evidence that the false statements made to the commission were deliberately false. The false testimony served a purpose: to obscure mistakes on the part of the F.A.A. and the military, and to overstate the readiness of the military to intercept and, if necessary, shoot down UAL 93."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._military_response_during_...
I'm reading the Vanity Fair article, it adds context missing from the raw communication. It helps to understand why it sounded so chaotic.
Is the movie worth watching?
@ 8:14 AM, original ATC (Boston Center) loses contact, attempts to reestablish contact, alerts various parties of no radio flight, makes them aware its flying without transponder, and clears traffic on its presumed heading. There's a lot of work to search on radars to fix the plane's exact position.
@ 8:20, word comes in (from American) that confirms it's a hijacking, and related centers spin up to work that. Note, they're initially calculating endurance, given that hijackers typically want to fly somewhere.
@ 8:34, the local Air National Guard is alerted, with a heads up that an official request will be coming shortly.
@ 8:37, position is confirmed visually by another plane, with the hijacked plane descending.
@ 8:38, NORAD (NEADS) is officially contacted, to report the flight has been hijacked and requesting an intercept.
@ 8:41, military pilots are readying.
@ 8:47, the World Trade Center is on fire.
33 minutes, to react to a situation that hasn't really happened in American airspace for a long, long time (ever?).
The only gap I could fault all involved with would be somehow expecting the unexpected -- that plane hijackers wouldn't be interested in flying the plane to safety, but would instead intentionally fly it into a building.
If that had been in the realm of considered possibilities, I assume fighters would have been scrambled much earlier.
Edit: Casting about for an analogy.
Imagine I called you up one morning, and I told you that you needed to have a VP or higher in your company authorize an action that might have serious legal ramifications, and needed to be coordinated with VP+ counterparts in 2 separate companies you've had some dealing with.
We'll even put aside uncertainty and doubt. You trust me, and want to make it happen.
Where do you think we'd be in 33 minutes?
Sadly it really shouldn't have been unexpected.
> ...between 1994 and 2001 CTC [CIA Counter Terrorism Center] collated no less than twelve specific reports warning that terrorists were scheming to hijack an airliner and fly it into a prestige target. Several of the reports actually named bin Laden and al Qai'da..
(from the book Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups by John Hughes-Wilson)
The amount of intelligence collected really shouldn't have been missed. There was tons of it, from all sorts of sources, including suspected terrorists on lists that were taking flying courses and asking about flying big airliners, who didn't have any interest in landing or taking-off It was an epic failure on the scale of the US intelligence epic failure of Pearl Harbor.
This is the needle in a haystack of needles problem. Of course it's obvious in hindsight.
But cueing the entire civilian ATC / ANG system to potentially shoot airliners out of the sky within 30 minutes?
Expecting that to be in place, even with overwhelming in number but unrealized reports, is unrealistic.
Reports on new capabilities and tactics of a terrorist organisation that has struck US targets and is considered among the most dangerous?
And then you have concrete reports on the ground of terrorist-connected people taking flying lessons and asking about bigger planes.
Even without hindsight that's pretty obvious things to relate and take note of.
In low signal, high noise scenarios, the hindsight bias is not saying "We should have known this meant something," but rather saying "We should have given this particular thing more attention."
In our world, it happens with logs. Post- or during an incident, reading back through a log to find the culprit is trivial.
But how easy is it to have a log continually dump to your terminal, all day, for weeks, months, years, and identify the root cause line as it happens and before other monitoring tripwires go off?
"In the chronology presented to the 9/11 commission, Colonel Scott put the time NORAD was first notified about United 93 at 9:16 a.m., from which time, he said, commanders tracked the flight closely. (It crashed at 10:03 a.m.) If it had indeed been necessary to "take lives in the air" with United 93, or any incoming flight to Washington, the two armed fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia would have been the ones called upon to carry out the shootdown. In Colonel Scott's account, those jets were given the order to launch at 9:24, within seconds of NEADS's receiving the F.A.A.'s report of the possible hijacking of American 77, the plane that would ultimately hit the Pentagon. This time line suggests the system was starting to work: the F.A.A. reports a hijacking, and the military reacts instantaneously. Launching after the report of American 77 would, in theory, have put the fighters in the air and in position over Washington in plenty of time to react to United 93."
But it didn't happen that way, and the two fighters that were over Washington that would have taken down United 93 were unarmed after recent training missions. If they had taken down the plane, it would not have been a shootdown, but a kamikaze mission: Marc H. Sasseville would take out the cockpit and Heather Penney would take out the tail, on the premise that just taking out an engine could leave them with a functioning glider.
What i've heard from someone who worked with the DGSE at that time: the US gov was actually told by at least three agencies to be careful, and that the MI6 actually had details about trained pilots.
The US has had a long, largely positive relationship with the Kingdom to include extensive economic investment as well as military support since at least the '50s (to sometimes an unconscionable degree considering some of the Saudi excesses in the war with Yemen.) It seems like maintaining this relationship with the US is in the best interests of both the Kingdom and its ruling class. The US seemingly continues to support Saudi Arabia at least in part as a check on the influence of Iran in the region.
There are some tensions and differences in ideology between the very religious rural areas and wealthy urban elites, so even the participation of individual Saudis doesn't seem to say much about the position of the Saudi government and the ideology of the state.
Since at least 1944: https://archive.org/details/chi_00005 (Seek to 12:28, sorry can't deep-link)
Weakening a very powerful ally to get more favorable treatment
Surreptitiously convincing an ally to start wars with SA rivals
Reenforcing SA’s necessity to the US as a ally in the region
Ordinary corruption
In general not “to attack” but for the various chains of effects expected from that attack
Saudis have a... "unique" economy. Disfunctional would probably be a better word.
And when you're essentially paid by the state, and your job isn't really a job, you search for other meaning in your life.
And if that meaning is religious fundamentalism, and the people you're hanging out with want money, and you have a lot of extra money...?
Well, things happen.
And why should it not? They have money, respect, and as posh of a lifestyle as can be bought.
But below the leaders, there's a lot of royal middle management with access to enough money to easily fund terrorism in the amounts we're talking about. And those people absolutely don't have the geopolitical pragmatism of their higher-ups.
See page 109 for conclusions
Pass
In other words its a "these people can't be heard because of who they've been accused of being" argument.
They are promoting a conspiracy theory that the WTC was destroyed by a controlled demolition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architects_%26_Engineers_for_9...
The outcome of 9/11 in terms of the gov't seizing the opportunity was going to happen either way - you need a better argument than "look what happened after".
Not the OP but I’m not reading 109 pages of analysis from 9-11 truthers in order to work out whether their conclusions are correct. That’s not the genetic fallacy either, I’d love someone else who I trust to do it and get back to me with what they find.
It’s impossible to avoid bias, however whether the bias is bad or not depends on the bias and the situation. My go tos are people whose biases I think are either actively helpful (e.g. experts in a field who I’ve previously vetted), irrelevant to the topic (e.g. an NYT journalist talking about cheesecake in pre-war Cambodia), or who have a history of self-deprecating humility to the naked truth regardless of where it leads them but also not incredulous but humble to their intellectual limitations (very rare but occasionally stumbled upon).
All of this to say, there are plenty of engineers that may have signed on to the original pledge that may have read the report and changed their minds. I never signed it, but I don't recommend buying into their claims. We have reasonable answers now.
The idea that someone snuck in hundreds of explosives and attached them to the building without any of the thousands of people who work in it noticing as a backup to an already elaborate air hijacking plan makes no sense.
I'm all for exposing corruption and I think there is enough to keep any anti government person occupied, but why do we get people inventing conspiracies in the most improbable of places? 9/11, Covid19 etc.
People also want the world to make more sense than it actually does. There being a secret group running things is at least _an_ explanation for the weird shit that happens, even if it doesn't really hold together.
There's a bunch of profit motives and politics involved as well usually.
Conspiracy theories are great because they're so efficient. Once started they are self reinforcing.
They must really believe that what they're saying is true.
Just want to point out that the document that OP linked claims in the conclusion that the NIST report is invalid, but I have no ability to judge that claim. I have no structural engineering knowledge and have never heard of either of these reports until now.
This was published March 2020 though, and I'd be curious if the analysis was cogent enough to warrant NIST's response in a few years
Is your comment exclusively for the two main towers, or tower 7? I have spoken with engineers who have reluctantly expressed confusion over tower 7. I'd appreciate a reply if you can bear it.
To others: I know to even touch the subject will have many sharpening their axes. Please save them for something other than honest curiosity, if you can.
The Alaska conclusions are correct as per their model. But their model is making assumptions about the spread of the fire and the damage that we lack concrete information to confirm or deny. It's easy to forget that on the day WTC 7 fell, we don't know how much of that building was on fire. A significant percentage of New York first responders had just died... There wasn't enough fire management on scene at WTC 7 to gather reasonable amounts of information, much less fight the fire.
It might have fallen due to thermal expansion of the main structural elements. It might have fallen due to controlled demolition. It might have fallen due to a sudden upsurge of the mole people from Hollow Earth. Too few people had eyes on for us to ever really know.
(Personal opinion: I don't know that we have any good models of what happens to a building close to but under 50 stories when two of the tallest buildings on the planet collapse immediately next to it. What earthquake-magnitude-equivalent force did the foundation of WTC 7 experience, and what effect would that have? The mole people model might be more accurate than I want it to be. ;) ).
* The NIST report made some assumptions that are not justified by actual evidence. The critical complaints are about the modelling of the exterior wall as a unit (?) that made it unreasonably stiff, and insufficient modelling of the actual joints between structural members. [I can't speak as to this accuracy, this is well beyond my understanding.]
* They did their own model of how the structure would behave due to heat and cannot confirm the NIST results.
* They also modelled the collapse on their own. I'm not 100% certain how the model works, but it looks like they basically deleted key structural members and observed how the structure would collapse when they did so.
* In order to match the recorded evidence, they had to delete key structural members very high up (higher than any floors known to have been on fire) to mirror the observed "penthouse kink", and they had to delete all the columns on an entire floor to mirror the fall. (And of course, no plausible mechanisms for either to occur other than controlled demolition).
If I'm following the report correctly--which is a big if--then they have two separate models which aren't used in conjunction with one another, and the first one "overturns" the analysis on how the fire could have caused a key structural member to fail, and the other one "concludes" that the key structural member failing couldn't have caused the collapse. In the latter model, as I understand it, there's no attempt to account for the deteriorated state of the building prior to the final collapse, for example the large gash in the building known to have occurred as a result of falling debris, or any putative (but not confirmed) damage that might have been caused by the long-running fire.
Overall, I didn't come away feeling impressed by their analysis.