New York Magazine: 9/11 The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll

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New York Magazine

 

 

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll

A new generation of conspiracy theorists is at work on a secret

history of New York's most terrible day.

 

* By Mark Jacobson

 

 

 

1. 11/22 and 9/11

They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this

Photoshopped age of unreliable narrators, much remains the same. The

assassination of President John Kennedy, the Crime of the Last

Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands—yet exactly

what happened remains in dispute. The Warren Commission found that Lee

Harvey Oswald, fellow traveler of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,

shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor

window of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission found that

Oswald, who two days later would be murdered by nightclub owner Jack

Ruby, acted alone.

 

Yet, as with so many such events, there is the sanctioned history and

the secret history—players hidden from view. In the Kennedy murder,

the involvement of shadowy organizations like the Mafia and the CIA

came into question. This way of thinking came to challenge the

official narrative put forth by the Warren Commission. It is not

exactly clear when the grassy knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window

in the popular mind-set. But now, four decades after Dallas, it is

difficult to find anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone

gunman.

 

But if Oswald didn't kill the president, who did? So 11/22 remains an

open case, an open wound.

 

Now here we are again, contemplating the seemingly unthinkable events

of September 11. An official explanation has been offered up: The

nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin

Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists. Again, this narrative has been

accepted by many.

 

But not all.

 

2.War Without End

" Just your average wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy nuts, "

Father Frank Morales told me as he surveyed the 200 or so graying

beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting IS IT FASCISM YET?

buttons who had assembled in the basement of St. Mark's Church for the

weekly Sunday-night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth Movement to

hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror:

Made in USA.

 

Saying he was in New York " to debunk the outrageous myth . . . the

absurd fairy tale " that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, were

the work of nineteen fanatics with box cutters sent by a bearded man

in a cave, the 60-year-old Tarpley projected a slide designated

" State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism, " depicting a Venn diagram of

three interconnected circles.

 

Circle one was labeled patsies, comprising " dupes, " " useful idiots, "

" fanatics, " " provocateurs, " and " Oswalds. " Included here were the

demonized bin Laden and alleged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta. The

second ring, marked MOLES, contained " government officials loyal to

the invisible government, " such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald

Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and, of course, George W. Bush. The third

circle, PROFESSIONAL KILLERS, encompassed " technicians, " " CIA special

forces, " " old boys " —the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and kept

their mouths shut.

 

September 11 was the true face of corporatized terror, said Tarpley,

graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton), and

author of an " unauthorized " biography of George Herbert Walker Bush.

The book paints the Bush-family patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, as

knowingly profiting from Hitler's Third Reich in his role as a

director of the Union Banking Corporation, where, Tarpley's book says,

the Nazis kept their money.

 

According to Tarpley, this, roughly, is how it went down on September

11: Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pet Goat–engrossed president played

their assigned roles enabling the strange events of the day, including

the wholesale " stand-down " of the multi-trillion-dollar American

air-defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main

players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged

72-virgin-craving crew got the blame, the towers collapsing not from

fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but thanks to a

well-planned " controlled demolition. "

 

Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the " unanswered

questions " that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the

so-called Official Story.

 

Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire,

did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center,

which was not hit by any airplane?

 

And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees

Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken

sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only 56 minutes in the case

of the South Tower?

 

And why, if the impact destroyed the planes' supposedly crash-proof

flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect

condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged

American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?

 

And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD?

 

How could they, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash,

allow an obviously hostile airplane to smash into the Pentagon,

headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for

chrissakes? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an

extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel

and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?

 

Sky commander: The fact that Bush spent much of 9/11 in the air while

Cheney was in de facto control in the White House leads some to

suggest the VP was ringleader.

AP)

 

And why was it so important, as decreed by Mayor Giuliani, to clear

away the debris, before all the bodies were recovered?

 

And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines

stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go

down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?

 

There were so many questions. But when it came to the big " why " of

9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: " Who benefits? "

 

For Tarpley and others, this was a slam dunk: September 11 was a

holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American

Century, which, like its Svengali, Leo Strauss, recognized the U.S.

masses to be meth-addled, postliterate, post-logical lard-asses, a

race of " sheeple " that would never rise to inherit the mantle of

post–Cold War world-dominators without " some catastrophic and

catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor. " In other words, a new Pearl

Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have

known about and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.

 

Pearl Harbor, the Reichstag fire, take your pick. What mattered was

that 3,000 human beings were dead, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush

to decree his fraudulent War on Terror, a Social

Darwinian/Hobbesian/with-us-or-against-us struggle to corner the

planet's dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only

the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.

 

3.Your " HOP " Level

In his paper " What Is Your `HOP' Level? " Nick Levis, who

co-coordinates the N.Y. 9/11 Truth meetings with Father Morales and

Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic narrative theories about September

11. The options essentially boil down to four.

 

(A) The Official Story (a.k.a. " The Official Conspiracy Theory " ). The

received Bushian line: Osama, nineteen freedom-haters with box

cutters, etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said, there

was " no warning. "

 

(B) The Incompetence Theory (also the Stupidity, Arrogance, " Reno

Wall " Theory). Accepts the Official Story, adds failure by the White

House, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. to heed ample warnings. This line was

advanced, with much ass-covering compensation, in The 9/11 Commission

Report.

 

© LIHOP (or " Let It Happen on Purpose " ). Many variations, but

primarily that elements of the U.S. government and the private sector

were aware of the hijackers' plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited

their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

 

(D) MIHOP ( " Made It Happen on Purpose " ). The U.S. government or

private forces planned and executed the attacks.

 

Tarpley's conception of a far-flung, supragovernmental alliance of

intelligence agencies (he reserves a key spot for Britain's MI6) and

military forces is only one of many MIHOPs floating around 9/11 Truth

circles. Popular are various configurations of a Cheney-Bush MIHOP,

with most asserting that the vice-president, who appeared to be in

charge on 9/11, was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is the

ecodoomsday Peak Oil MIHOP, the idea that the " peaking " of petroleum

reserves required a false provocation to start an " oil war " in the

Middle East.

 

More controversial is Mossad MIHOP: the conjecture that Israeli

intelligence (and kowtowing by the U.S. to the " Israel lobby " ) played

a crucial role, attempting to draw the U.S. into a prolonged struggle

with Israel's enemies. Notable in this is the " white van " story: Five

men observed filming the attacks from Liberty State Park were later

pulled over by cops near Giants Stadium. One man was found to have

$4,700 in his sock. " We are Israelis, " the men reportedly told the

cops. " We are not your problem. " The men were quickly deported to

Israel, after which the Forward claimed that the company that owned

the van, Urban Moving Systems, was a Mossad front.

 

Mossad MIHOP dovetails with the baseless rumor, widely believed in

Arab countries, that 4,000 Jewish World Trade Center workers were told

to stay home that day, showing that conspiracy theory can be tricky

terrain. Mossad MIHOP easily morphs into Zionist MIHOP or Jewish

MIHOP, leading to the charges of anti-Semitism that have dogged the

9/11 Truth movement. " Do I believe Israel has undue influence over

U.S. foreign policy? " asks one activist. " Absolutely. But there are

people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. You have to draw the

line at Holocaust denial. "

 

Deeper into late-night-talk-radio, Da Vinci Code territory are

numerous incarnations of the New World Order MIHOP, defined by Nick

Levis as the work of " a global ruling elite seeking greater control of

the world Zeitgeist. " Ever elastic, NWO MIHOPs often date back to

secret societies like the Knights Templar, founded in 1118 during the

First Crusade. (Bush's alleged slip of calling the terror war a

" crusade " was a key hint to the real, if surreal, agenda.) The

continuity is clear to any student of the hidden history. The Templars

begat the Freemasons (look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on every

dollar in your pocket, fool!), from whom emerged the nefarious

Illuminati, and onward to current standard-bearers like Yale's Skull

and Bones society (both Bushes are Bonesmen; John Kerry, too), the

Council on Foreign Relations, and the blue-helmeted armies of the

United Nations.

 

Cave man: Fundamental to the theorists' worldview is that bin Laden,

living in primitive conditions half a world away, could not have

orchestrated such a complex plot.

AP)

 

Less-cited scenarios include Sino MIHOP, claiming the attack was a

first strike in the inevitable conflict between China and the West.

Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, imagining evil Thetan

psychologists as culprits. In the postmodern battle of paranoid

narratives, we get to choose our terror dream, identify our own evil

genius.

 

4.Inevitable MIHOP

" For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because the more you know, the more you

know, " says Les Jamieson, a friendly, eminently reasonable 51-year-old

from Brooklyn who remembers the moment the scales of Official Story

hallucination fell from his eyes.

 

" I read a story in Newsweek, which said these generals were told

earlier that week not to fly. Obviously, someone knew. My reaction

was, `Holy shit.' This process has been one holy shit after another. "

 

Father Frank Morales's conversion was more dramatic. Raised in the

Jacob Riis Projects, Morales, who if not for his priest collar could

be mistaken for an East Village hipster, is a longtime Lower East Side

hero, primarily for his work with local squatter communities. The day

after 9/11, the diocese asked if he'd go to ground zero to perform

last rites. " They said be prepared, because `we're not talking bodies,

Frank, we're talking body parts.' "

 

" I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest

is supposed to feel, " says Morales. Sitting with a fireman, Morales

called out, " If I had somebody in this mess, I'd wanna get those

motherfuckers. " It was then, Morales says, that the fireman whispered,

" Hey, that's not it. You wanna know something? Bush and bin Laden have

the same banker. "

 

It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act and Iraq,

that turned him into a 9/11 Truth activist, says Morales, who likewise

sees little alternative to MIHOP.

 

" To me, " Morales says, " this is about history. History and truth, the

nature of truth in a not particularly truthful age. "

 

" We're like the minutemen of Revolutionary times, prosecutors in the

discovery phase for a trial that is sure to come, " says Jamieson, who

on Saturday afternoons can often be found at ground zero holding up a

banner proclaiming that 9/11 was AN INSIDE JOB.

 

As 9/11 Truth advocates know well, the veracity they seek is unlikely

to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. They've got people

on their side like the " WebFairy, " who runs a site " proving " the

towers were not hit by planes but holograms, or " ghost planes. " Still,

the truth movement wields one irrefutably puissant weapon in its

struggle. As Nick Levis says, " Would you believe anything George W.

Bush told you? "

 

5.A Fast-Moving Meme

Google " 911 conspiracy " and the bytes bury you. The first great

conspiracy theory of the Internet Age—imagine JFK assassinationology

with the Web!—9/11 Truth is a fast-moving meme. The thicket of " truth "

sites is myriad. There is " 911truth.org, " 911forthetruth.com, "

" 911truthla.org, " " nakedfor911truth.com, " " 911truthemergence.com, "

" 911citizenswatch.org, " " 911research.wtc7.net, " " 911review.com, " and

hundreds more.

 

It can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in

the 9/11 Truth assault. Apocalyptical survivalists and extreme

Bush-haters are equally attracted to the movement's blanket J'accuse.

Be you a Starbucks-window breaker or John Bircher, you don't need a

weatherman to know which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist

windbaggery blows.

 

This is not a movement that takes its Nagra tape recorders to document

Dealey Plaza acoustics to ascertain which bullet came from what angle.

When 9/11 Truth " researchers " cite " the physical evidence, " they

usually mean the referred reality of photographs or videos posted on

the Net. Paul Thompson, whose 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed

gold standard of Truth research, does all his work on the Net. " I

don't have to be any particular place to do this, " says Thompson, who

for a while moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to

concentrate.

 

Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this movement. The

conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. As

Marshall McLuhan would swear if he weren't dead, there has never been

a more conspiracy-ready medium than the Net. It is an exhilarating

serendipity that every surfer has felt: the glorious synchronicity in

the way one link handshakes the next, the sensation of not knowing how

you got there but being sure this is the right place. Such miraculous

methodology cannot simply be random. For the moment, it feels like Truth.

 

Coincidences are rife. What is to be made of reports that prior to

September 11, parties unknown purchased the domain names

" nycterrorstrike.com, " " horrorinnewyork.com, " and

" tradetowerstrike.com. " Was this Mohammad Atta's idea of a cyberjoke?

 

Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel Players, by Don

DeLillo. Published in 1977, the book describes how Pammy, working for

a firm called Grief Management Council, which has its offices in the

World Trade Center, at first thought the WTC was " an unlikely

headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as

time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? " Later,

DeLillo writes, " to Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They

remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some

routine distortion of light. "

 

Mystery Plane: The plane that hit the Pentagon isn't seen in any

photographs. Some ask if it existed at all.

 

Even dismissing numerological smut—like how 9+1+1=11 and there are

eleven letters in both George W. Bush and The Pentagon, for which

ground was broken September 11, 1941, exactly 155 (=11) years after

the Masonic-dominated Founding Fathers opened the Constitutional

Convention on September 11, 1786, not to mention, for CIA MIHOP fans,

that Kissinger and the Langley boys chose September 11, 1973, to

overthrow Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende—we appear to

have entered the realm of the precognitively strange.

 

Does it matter that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a

short-lived Fox knockoff of The X-Files), which aired on March 4,

2001, tells the story of a U.S. government agency's plot to crash a

remote-controlled 727 into the World Trade Center as an excuse to

raise the military budget and then blame the attack on a " tin-pot

dictator " who was " begging to be smart-bombed " ?

 

And why does every 9-year-old know how to fold a $20 bill so it forms

a likeness of the burning Pentagon on one side and the Trade Center on

the back? (See clydelewis.com/twenty.html.)

 

German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen may have been roundly chastised

for calling 9/11 " the greatest work of art ever. " Yet what is the

conspiracist's obsessive attempt to make sense where there is no sense

but a kind of (paranoid) art? No wonder Jungian shrinks, who churn out

copious papers on the topic, are so crazy about 9/11. It's got so much

archetype. Perhaps one of these learned men will pen a monograph on

mandala-like smoke patterns (wwnet.fi/users/veijone/satan.htm) in the

burning South Tower, which seem to form a likeness of Lucifer?

 

6.Inside the Truth Vacuum

" People are always coming up with stuff about holograms and planes

shooting pods. That's what happens when the truth is systematically

suppressed, " says Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, was killed

in the attacks.

 

Monica, who describes herself as being " a completely normal housewife

paying my taxes, raising my children " before 9/11 and who now lives on

Long Island " with my dog, my alarm, and some plants, " testified before

the 9/11 Commission. She ended her statement saying she hoped " this

commission understands the need to leave a legacy of truth,

accountability, and reform as a tribute to all of the innocent victims

.. . . We look to you for leadership. "

 

Asked if she ever expected to get a " legacy of truth, " Monica, who

manifests an endearingly New Yorkish manner, laughs. " I must be an

idiot because, yeah, I did. I was brought up to believe in things like

the U.S. government. But we got screwed. The commission was whitewash,

a stonewall. Maybe 3,000 people dead wasn't enough to do the right

thing. Did they need 5,000, or 10,000?

 

" They had these people come in, made them promise to do better next

time, and gave them medals. Rich was dead, and nobody was at fault. To

me, that's a sin . . . With them, everything is fake. The government

gave out ceremonial urns to the victims' families. It had beach sand

inside. From Coney Island or somewhere. They could have at least used

the dust from the Trade Center. Something real. "

 

Asked about 9/11 Truth, Monica laughs again. " You want

tinfoil-hat-wearing nutters? I get these e-mails from this woman.

She's nice, supportive. Then she says to be careful because `our

thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions are being controlled 100,000

percent by electromagnetic waves.' But I write back. I know she means

well. Everyone needs a friend. "

 

" Conspiracy theories, " says Lorie Van Auken with a sigh. She's one of

the " Jersey girls " who pushed the Bush administration to convene the

9/11 Commission. Her husband, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed

in the North Tower. She says, " That's why we demanded the commission,

so there wouldn't be any conspiracy theories.

 

" Now, when I hear Philip Zelikow [the 9/11 Commission's executive

director] wrote a book with Condi Rice or was seen with Karl Rove, it

drives me crazy. I feel like I'm trapped in a truth vacuum. "

 

One thing that has changed over Lorie's " career as a 9/11 widow " is

that she's come to appreciate " these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you

want to call them.

 

" At first, we widows didn't want to be seen with conspiracy people.

But they kept showing up. They cared more than those supposedly doing

the investigating. If you ask me, they're just Americans, looking for

the truth, which is supposed to be our right. "

 

7.Why 7 WTC Fell

Talking to these women was not unlike watching the Zapruder film, I

thought. The famous 8-mm. movie shot by ladies'-garment manufacturer

Abraham Zapruder has been used to justify any number of

Kennedy-assassination theories. Think the driver of the limo was the

actual shooter, as a few nutbags have postulated? It's in the Zapruder

film, if you're stoned and squint enough.

 

Hot Zone: The fact that people, like the woman in this picture, could

survive near the impact zone suggests the fires weren't hot enough to

melt structural steel.

AP)

 

However, you always get to the part where the president's head

explodes in a flash and shower of blood. It remains a horrible, frozen

moment. One look and I am back in geometry class at Francis Lewis High

School, the principal's voice on the loudspeaker saying that the

president had been shot, that he was " dead. "

 

Speaking with the widows, or simply walking by a firehouse, was a

teleportation back to the raw unspun brutality of the Day. This isn't

as much of a stretch as it sounds, since I was there on September 11.

 

I'd just walked right into what would come to be called ground zero.

No one stopped me. I knew the towers had fallen, seen it on TV. Still,

I didn't expect things that big to totally disappear, as if the ground

had swallowed them up.

 

" Where are the towers? " I asked a fireman. " Under your foot " was the

reply.

 

Hours later, I sat down beside another, impossibly weary firefighter.

Covered with dust, he was drinking a bottle of Poland Spring water.

Half his squad was missing. They'd gone into the South Tower and never

come out. Then, almost as a non sequitur, the fireman indicated the

building in front of us, maybe 400 yards away.

 

" That building is coming down, " he said with a drained casualness.

 

" Really? " I asked. At 47 stories, it would be a skyscraper in most

cities, centerpiece of the horizon. But in New York, it was nothing

but a nondescript box with fire coming out of the windows. " When? "

 

" Tonight . . . Maybe tomorrow morning. "

 

This was around 5:15 p.m. I know because five minutes later, at 5:20,

the building, 7 World Trade Center, crumbled.

 

" Shit! " I screamed, unsure which way to run, because who knows which

way these things fall. As it turned out, I wasn't in any danger, since

7 WTC appeared to drop straight down. I still have dreams about the

moment. Even then, the event is oddly undramatic, just a building falling.

 

Now the 9/11 Truth movement tells me I saw much more. According to Jim

Hoffman, a software engineer and physicist from Alameda, California,

where he authors the site 911research.wtc7.net, what I saw was a

" classic controlled demolition. " This was why, Hoffman contends, 7 WTC

dropped so rapidly (in about 6.6 seconds, or almost at the speed of a

free-falling object) and so neatly, into its " own footprint. "

 

For 7 WTC to collapse unaided at that speed, Hoffman says, would mean

" its 58 perimeter columns and 25 central columns of structural steel

would have to have been shattered at almost the same instant, so

unlikely as to be impossible. "

 

What happened at 7 WTC might be the key to the entire mystery of

September 11, contends Hoffman. The $500 million insurance profit made

by Larry Silverstein is a garden-variety motive, but the list of 7 WTC

tenants sets conspiracy heads spinning.

 

To wit: The IRS, the Department of Defense, and the CIA kept offices

on the 25th floor. The Secret Service occupied the ninth and tenth.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (home to vast records of bank

transactions) was on floors 11 through 13. The 23rd floor was home to

Rudy Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management, his crisis center. If

this wasn't enough, the mortgage of 7 WTC was held by the Blackstone

Group, headed by Pete Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign

Relations, stalwart players in any NWO MIHOP.

 

In the 9/11 Truth cosmology, the destruction of 7 World Trade Center

is akin to Jack Ruby's shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Seven WTC was the

home of secrets. It had to go. Central to the scenario is a comment

made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary.

 

" We've had such a terrible loss of life, " he quotes himself as saying

on 9/11. " Maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. "

 

" Pull it, " as Truth people never tire of repeating, is the term

usually used for controlled demolition.

 

These were vexing questions, especially since 7 WTC is not even

mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report. Nor is the building given

much shrift in the subsequent " Final Report on the Collapse of World

Trade Center Towers, " compiled by the National Institute of Standards

and Technology (NIST).

 

And there I was, thinking all I saw was a building falling down.

 

8.The Magician and the Expert

A few days after the St. Mark's meeting, I went to a Community Board

No. 1 forum where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was

in the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest structure when it was

completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed a good place

to talk about the only former world's tallest building(s) to fall

down. I was with William Rodriguez, who, as he always does, brought

along his video camera, " so they know I'm watching them. "

 

Smoke Bomb: Could this puff of smoke be evidence of an internal

explosion consistent with controlled demolition?

AP)

 

As a boy shining shoes in Puerto Rico, William dreamed of being

wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down from a flaming

rope. " That was going to be my big trick. It was my goal to become a

magician, the greatest illusionist in the Caribbean basin. "

 

Later, Rodriguez met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, the

magician best known as a debunker of supernatural claims, offering the

One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate

verifiable evidence of psychic powers.

 

" Randi was my mentor, " said William. " I admired him for his tricks but

also because he never said they were anything but tricks. He separated

the truth from the phony. "

 

William moved to New York, but beyond some gigs at Mostly Magic, his

career did not take off. He started working for a cleaning company in

the World Trade Center. He'd stay there twenty years.

 

On 9/11, William was late. Instead of mopping the stairwells on the

110th floor, where he almost certainly would have died, he was

chatting with the maintenance crew on level B-1 in the basement. " I

heard this massive explosion below, on level B-2 or 3. I saw this guy

come up the stairs. The skin on his arms was peeled away . . .

hanging. Then I heard another explosion, from above. That was the

first plane, hitting the building. "

 

In possession of one of the few master keys in the building, William

led firemen up the stairwells. He was responsible for getting at least

a dozen people out of the towers. Trying to escape as the North Tower

fell, he found himself beneath a half-buried fire engine.

 

" I told myself this is going to be a slow death, but I should make it

last as long as I could. My training as an escape artist helped me. I

knew to be calm. They found me just in time. I understood my whole

life had been pointing to this moment. "

 

Acclaimed as " the last man pulled from the rubble, " William became a

hero of 9/11. " I was at the White House. They took my picture with

President Bush. "

 

Four years later, after repeatedly being rebuffed in his attempts to

tell officials his story about the basement explosion, William is

suing the U.S. government under the rico statute, legislation drafted

to prosecute Mafia families. The suit reads like an Air America wet

dream, with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft,

George Tenet, Karl Rove, and others (the Diebold Company is thrown in

for good measure) listed as defendants.

 

" They say I'm a conspiracy theorist; I call them conspirators, too, "

William says.

 

" It is like Randi said. There's reality, and there's illusion. When

illusion becomes reality, that's a problem. Nine-eleven is a giant

illusion. Besides, what can they do to me? I'm a national hero, Bush

told me so himself. "

 

" That's him, the NIST guy, " William said, indicating Dr. S. Shyam

Sunder, head of the institute's Trade Center report.

 

An elegantly attired man in his fifties, Dr. Sunder, holder of degrees

from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and MIT, took his

seat beside Carl Galioto, a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,

architects of the new $700 million replacement for 7 WTC. Behind them

was a slide of " the new downtown skyline, " dominated by another

Skidmore project, the Freedom Tower, which, at an iconic 1,776 feet,

is next in line to be the world's tallest building. Like the new 7

WTC, which Galioto said featured a " two-foot-thick vertical core

encasing the elevators, utility infrastructure, and exit stairs, " the

Freedom Tower will be " among the safest buildings ever built. " This

was important, the architect said, because " constantly building and

rebuilding " was what New York was all about.

 

After Dr. Sunder's presentation (planes and fire did it), a woman from

N.Y. 9/11 Truth stood up and said she hadn't been able " to sleep at

night " since her best friend had died at the WTC. She had hoped NIST

would clear up doubts, but this was not the case. " I have here a

report which contradicts much of what you say. "

 

The woman put a paper by Steven E. Jones, a physics professor from

Brigham Young University, in front of Dr. Sunder. Jones makes the case

for controlled demolition, claiming the persistence of " molten metal "

at ground zero indicates the likely presence of " high-temperature

cutter-charges . . . routinely used to melt/cut/demolish steel. "

 

" I hope you read this; perhaps it will enable you to see things a

different way, " the woman said.

 

" Actually, I have read it, " Dr. Sunder said with a sigh.

 

Later, asked if such outbursts were common, Dr. Sunder said, " Yes. I

am sympathetic. But our report . . . it is extensive. We consulted 80

public-sector experts and 125 private-sector experts. It is a Who's

Who of experts. People look for other solutions. As scientists, we

can't worry about that. Facts are facts. "

 

Brother Act: One of many eerie 9/11 coincidences is that Marvin Bush,

the president's brother, worked for a firm that handled security for

the WTC, and United and American airlines.

AP)

 

I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building

barely mentioned in the final report?

 

This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to

release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year.

 

NIST did have some " preliminary hypotheses " on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said.

" We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the

structure, on the fifth to seventh floors. "

 

Then Dr. Sunder paused. " But truthfully, I don't really know. We've

had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7. "

 

9.Can 49.3 Percent of the People Be Crazy?

Late in the summer of 2004, as the Republicans in Madison Square

Garden extolled George Bush's staunch protection of the homeland, a

Zogby poll asked New Yorkers if they believed that " some of our

leaders knew in advance attacks were planned on or around September

11, 2001, and consciously failed to act. "

 

Of city residents, 49.3 percent said yes.

 

A year and a half later, doubt had increased, at least according to my

own informal canvassing. Per Nick Levis's " HOP " paper, I offered four

choices: (A) the Official Story; (B) the Official Story plus

incompetence; © LIHOP; (D) MIHOP.

 

Of the 56 respondents, 28 said C, 23 picked B, with 4 (including two

Muslim cabdrivers) opting for MIHOP.

 

Almost every white person with a straight job said B. Many disliked

Bush but said they couldn't bring themselves to believe the U.S.

government would take part in the death of 3,000 of its countrymen.

 

Typical was the opinion offered by an investment banker at a downtown

bar. " I can see them wishing it would happen, secretly happy it did.

But on purpose? Look at the way they've managed Iraq. They're boobs.

They couldn't have pulled off 9/11 without getting caught. Not possible. "

 

Uptown, responses were different. " Yeah, they knew, " said a retired

transit worker on 116th Street, one of the 17 of 22 black people

questioned who picked C. He said he'd heard Marvin Bush, the

president's younger brother, was a director of Securacom, a firm that

on 9/11 was in charge of security not only at the World Trade Center

but also for United and American airlines as well as at Dulles

airport, where Flight 77 took off.

 

" That true? " he asked.

 

Yeah, I said. That's what I heard.

 

" There anywhere he ain't got no brother? "

 

" Bush's cousin, Wirt Walker III, worked there, too. "

 

" Wirt? The third? You're shitting me. "

 

This was pretty much the opinion. If Katrina proved the government was

willing to let people die, right there on TV, why should 9/11 have

been any different? Only one person picked A, the official story. This

was a fireman, who was smoking a cigarette outside a downtown engine

company. Truth be told, I wasn't keen on quizzing firemen about 9/11

Truth, but I knew the guy's brother from high school.

 

" Not answering that, " he said, warning not to ask others in the

company, which had lost men on 9/11. This didn't mean he wasn't of the

opinion that if he lived to be a million he'd never " see anything as

corrupt, bullshit, and sad as what happened at the WTC.

 

" They got their gold and shipped us to Fresh Kills, " he said. Call it

one more conspiracy theory, but many uniformed firefighters believe

the powers that be cared more about finding the gold reserves held in

vaults beneath the Trade Center than the bodies of their fallen brothers.

 

Still, the fireman said, if he had to pick a letter in my poll, it

would be A.

 

" Osama fucking bin Laden, like Bush says. If I thought it was someone

else, then I'd have to do something about it. And I don't want to

think about what I'd do. "

 

10.Disinformation

It weighs on you, thinking about 9/11, the day and the unremitting

aftermath. Being a supposedly unflappable New Yorker offers little

solace. The wound remains unhealed, emotions close to the surface.

 

Certainly there was an urgency as activists gathered at the Veselka

restaurant after the Tarpley meeting.

 

With all the saber-rattling about Iran, this was no time to decrease

vigilance, said Nick Levis, proposing a toast: " That in 2006, we will

crack the Official Story so we can stop being 9/11-heads and return to

normality. " A classically hermetic New York conversation ensued,

quickly moving from snickers about bin Laden's supposed CIA code name,

" Tim Osmond . . . as in Donny and Marie, " to speculation about the

role of Jerry Hauer, Giuliani's former OEM guy, in the post-9/11

anthrax threats.

 

Talk came to a halt, however, with the mention of whether it was

American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

 

For New York Magazine)

 

Broached in 2002 by Thierry Meyssan in his French best-seller

L'Effroyable Imposture (The Appalling Fraud), the idea that the

Pentagon was struck by a missile instead of a 757 is the most

controversial tenet of 9/11 Truth–iana. The claim is based on

Meyssan's reading of photographs ( " Hunt the Boeing " at

asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm) supposedly

showing the hole in the building to be no more than fifteen to

eighteen feet wide—far too small to fit a plane with a 125-foot wingspan.

 

But there are problems, such as the many eyewitnesses who saw a plane

flying low near the Pentagon shortly before impact. Disputing the

no-crash theory, Jim Hoffman has argued, " This is just the sort of

wackiness defenders of the Official Story harp on to show how gullible

and incompetent we conspiracy theorists are supposed to be. " In other

words, Meyssan and other no-plane believers were either wrong,

unknowing dupes or spreaders of disinformation.

 

The D-word is nothing to take lightly in conspiracy circles. For, as

Thomas Pynchon notes in his " Proverbs for Paranoids, " if they can get

you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

 

At Veselka, the question was, if Flight 77 did not crash, what

happened to the 56 people on the plane? This query did not sit well

with Nico Haupt, a thin, black-clad man from Cologne, Germany,

compiler of the 9/11 Encyclopedia (911review.org/Wiki/Sept11Topics.shtml).

 

" Gassed, " he hissed. " Have you ever heard of gassing? It is very easy.

You open the door of the plane, and it spreads. "

 

" You think they gassed them? " Would even the Illuminati stoop this low?

 

Haupt cast a withering look. " That, or some other method of murder.

Assholes! "

 

" Nico, calm down, " said Tarpley. " This is tactics. There's no reason

to make an enormous moral issue out of everything. "

 

But Haupt was past consoling. " You are motherfuckers. Stupid

motherfuckers. " Slamming the tabletop, he gathered his things and

stormed out.

 

" Nico is so emotional, " said one activist, returning to her plate of

pierogi.

 

11. 250 Greenwich Street

After dinner, I stopped at ground zero. Before the towers were built,

my father took me here when the area was called Radio Row and sold

tubes cheap. After 9/11, I spent many nights watching the great plume

of water, shining in the vapor lamps, raining onto the smoking pit.

 

Now I was in front of the replacement for 7 WTC, Silverstein's $700

million baby, a nifty parallelogram with a stainless-steel finish like

a Viking stove in a Soho loft. According to the Web brochure, 7 WTC

collapsed " probably " as a result of " the ignition of Con Edison diesel

stored in the base. " To " avoid this hazard in the new building, the

diesel is stored under the new plaza across from the reopened

Greenwich Street. "

 

Another change is the offering of an alternative address, 250

Greenwich Street. Apparently, Silverstein felt this would play better

in " the trendy Tribeca neighborhood. " Call it real-estate MIHOP.

 

When the new 7 WTC opens, N.Y. 9/11 Truth plans a demonstration here.

Now, however, it being late Sunday night, the place looked like a

neutron-bomb landscape, lights on in the finished lobby, gleaming

card-reading security gates in place, but no sign of humanity anywhere.

 

A giant LCD screen scrolled various alphabetical fonts, one after

another. It was numbing watching this, thinking that time was moving

on, new fortunes would be made here, and like 11/22, it would never be

known who did what on 9/11.

 

A cop car pulled up. They wanted me to move on. Cops always want you

to move on. Not that I was in any hurry. Larry Silverstein didn't own

the sidewalk. I had as much right to the disaster as anyone.

 

Then I remembered one more factoid. David Cohen, who headed the CIA

office at 7 WTC on September 11, was the same guy hired by Ray Kelly

as deputy commissioner of Intelligence. It was Cohen who instituted

the subway bag search, one more chimera of security in the post-9/11

world. Who knew what a guy like that might be up to? So I moved on.

Can't trust anyone nowadays.

 

The Plane Truth

9/11 conspiracy theories, from nuts to soup.

 

Mossad Did It

A common theory, especially in the Arab world, holds that Israel

orchestrated the attacks in order to bring the U.S. into conflict with

Israel's enemies. Evidence cited ranges from the arly spurious and

deeply anti-Semitic (the oft-heard, oft-refuted canard that Jews were

told to leave the towers before the attacks) to the apparently true

but unexplainable. (Five men who were seen filming the attacks in

Liberty Park were later apprehended and found by the Forward to have

ties to Mossad.)

 

Oilmen Did It

A theory based on the idea that worldwide oil production, having

reached its peak, is beginning a long decline, leading to surging

energy prices and global economic collapse. The 9/11 attacks, goes

this scenario, were orchestrated by Cheney, Bush, and their friends in

the oil industry and government, in order to begin a process that

would secure further reserves in Iraq and increase the U.S. military

presence in the Persian Gulf.

 

Bush and Cheney Did it

The most basic of conspiracy theories. Bush and Cheney orchestrated

the attacks, for much the same reason Roosevelt was sometimes said to

have orchestrated Pearl Harbor: in order to begin the conflict that

would allow them to realize their global ambitions.

 

The New World Order Did It

After winning a long struggle against the old Kissingerian pragmatists

and balance-of-power devotees, neocon idealists centered at the

Council on Foreign Relations initiated the conflict in order to

establish the United States as the sole global power.

 

A Rogue Network Did It

A secret government used Bush and Cheney as patsies in carrying out

the attacks. Bush was kept on the run in Air Force One (code-named

" Angel " ) by an anonymous call saying, " Angel is next. " Bin Laden and

his henchmen were CIA plants and double agents. Britain's MI6

intelligence service was involved. The towers were blown up from

inside, by teams of secret government assassins. Even Bush and Cheney

are in the dark about why the attacks took place.

 

Shrinks Did It

Scientologists believe that psychiatry (through a mechanism that

remains murky) helped give birth to the suicide attackers " through

drugs and psycho-political methods. "

 

–Reported by Janelle Nanos