For a post-9/11 world, there is a post-9/11 flow of information. Without the web, 9/11truth does not exist. This is not a movement where people are taking their Nagra tape recorders to document the acoustics of Dealey Plaza, so as to better ascertain which bullet came from what angle. When 9/11truth “researchers” refer to “the physical evidence,” they often are referring to pictures posted on various blog sites. They are stay-at-home interpreters of graphics, analyzers of webcasts. Paul Thompson, whose copiously detailed 9/11 timeline has become the undisputed gold standard of all Truth research, does all his work on the Net. If it’s not online, it is not in the timeline.
“I don’t have to be in any particular place to do this,” says Thompson, who for a time moved to New Zealand so it would be easier for him to concentrate.
Yet it is difficult to deny the allure of this Web-based critique. The conspiracist has always relied on a degree of magical thinking. And, as Marshall McLuhan would doubtless assert if he wasn’t dead, there has never been a tool more paranoia-ready than the Internet. It is an exhilarating serendipity that every surfer has felt: the way one link seems to lead miraculously to the next, each connection synchronistically handshaking to the one beyond, the notion of not knowing how exactly you wound up where you are but being sure, absolutely sure, that you have arrived at precisely the right place. Conclusions made by the aegis of such miraculous method cannot simply be random. For the moment, and maybe longer, it feels like Truth.
Spooky coincidences and clairvoyances abound. How does one accomo-date the fact that in the months prior to September 11 parties unknown purchased the domain names “nycterrorstrike.com,” “horrorinnewyork.com,” “tradetowerstrike.com,” “tradecenterbombs.com,” and several others. Was this Mohammad Atta’s idea of a cyber joke?
Consider Pammy Wynant, protagonist of the novel Players by Don DeLillo (big surprise, that). 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 felt 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?” A few lines 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.”
Even to dismiss the usual numerologic smut about how 9+1+1=11 and the fact that there are eleven letters in both George W. Bush and The Pentagon—for which ground was broken September 11, 1941, exactly 155 (1+5+5=11) years after the Masonic-dominated founding fathers opened the Constitutional Convention on September 11, 1786—not to mention that Kennedy was killed on 11/22 and, for CIA MIHOP fans, that Kissinger and the Langley boys chose September 11, 1973, to wipe out Chilean socialist president Salvatore Allende—it is fairly clear that we have entered a realm of the precognitively strange.
What, for instance, is to be made of the fact that the pilot for the conspiracy-themed Lone Gunmen (a short-lived Fox knock-off of the X-Files), which aired on March 4, 2001, tells the story of a secret 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 foreign “tin-pot dictators” who were “begging to be smart-bombed.”
And what, for instance, does it mean that if you fold a $20 bill just right it forms a likeness of the burning Pentagon on one side and the similarly enflamed Trade Center on the back? (see http://www.glennbeck.com/news/05172002.shtml).
No wonder Jungian shrinks are so crazy about 9/11. It’s got so much archetype. I’ve got no less than three Jungian monographs on the Trade Towers in my possession at this moment. In examining 9/11 trauma, Dr. Ashok Bedi finds mythic resonance in the stories of Shiva, Parvati, and Kali. Dr. Sylvester Wojtkowski, who was kind enough to forward me his paper “Approaching the Unspeakable—Regarding 9/11,” draws on the Medusa myth as an explainer. I should like someday to discuss with either of these learned men the significance of the curious arrangement of the smoke from the South Tower that appears to form the face of Lucifer. Put “Devil-face-9/11-smoke” into Google to check it out.
6. INSIDE THE TRUTH VACUUM
“No wonder these people come up with all this stuff about bombs and planes, shooting pods, and missiles. What are people supposed to think when the truth of what really happened is systematically suppressed?” This was how Monica Gabrielle felt four and half years after her husband, Richard, who worked on the seventy-eighth floor of the South Tower, was killed when the building collapsed. Monica, who describes herself as being “a completely normal, housewife paying my taxes, raising my children” before her husband’s death and now lives on Long Island “with my dog, my alarm, and some plants,” testified before the 9/11 Commission in late 2003. 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 now look to you for leadership.”
Asked if she ever expected to get a “legacy of truth” she was looking for, Monica, a woman with an endearingly brassy New York manner, let out a loud, derisive laugh. “I must be an idiot because, yeah, I did. That was how I was brought up, to think the government did their job. But they didn’t. We got screwed, that’s what we got. A whitewash, a stonewall. I guess they didn’t think three thousand people dead was enough to do the right thing. Maybe five thousand, or ten thousand would have been. When I read that report I felt like a sap, a sucker.
“They could have solved a lot of mysteries. They could have found out how the FAA screwed up. They could have figured out who was running the country when Bush was flying around in Air Force One. All they did was have people like Rumsfeld come in, make them promise to do better next time, and give them all medals. My husband was dead and nobody was at fault. They didn’t point the finger at anyone. To me, that’s a sin, something I can’t forgive.
“One thing that bothers me is the realization that Rich’s death wasn’t just him dying. This was something that was going to be in the history books, stuff children might be learning about in school long after I was gone. And what are those history books going to say? Damn. A while ago the government came around giving out these ceremonial urns, a keep-sake of the loved ones. I looked inside. It had beach sand. From Coney Island or somewhere. You figure they could have at least put some of the dust from the Trade Center in there. Something real.”
Asked about 9/11truth, Monica laughed heartily. “Nutters? You want nutters? I’m a magnet for them. I keep getting these e-mails from this one woman. She has a lot of theories. She just wrote me that we all have to be careful because ‘our thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions are being controlled 100,000 percent by secret electromagnetic waves.’ How do you respond to something like that? Still, I write back. Everyone needs a friend, you know.”
Hearing this, Laurie Van Auken laughs. “Yeah, I get those too,” says Laurie, one of the original “Jersey Girls” whose now legendary persistence pushed the reluctant Bush administration to convene the 9/11 Committee in the first place. Her husband, Kenneth, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee working on the 105th floor of the North Tower, called her to say something hit the building and he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to get out. It wasn’t until three days later, hearing that none of Cantor’s employees survived, that she knew her husband was dead.
“Conspiracy theories,” Laurie says, with a sigh. “That was one of reasons we demanded they have the Commission to begin with. To get to the bottom of things. So there wouldn’t be any conspiracy theories.”
Just talking about it was enough to get Laurie outraged all over again. “When I hear Philip Zelikow (the 9/11 commission “executive director,” who oversaw the production of the report) 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 Laurie’s “career as a 9/11 wido
w.” She’s come to appreciate “these conspiracy nuts, or whatever you want to call them…. When we first started this process, we widows didn’t want to seen with any of the conspiracy people. We thought they’d damage our case. But they kept showing up. They seemed to care a lot more than the people supposedly doing the investigating. If you ask me, they’re just Americans. Americans looking for the truth, which is supposed to be our right.”
7. WTC 7 FALLING DOWN
Talking to Monica Gabrielle and Laurie Van Auken reminded me of the last time I watched the Zapruder film, the most famous visual record of the Kennedy assassination. Shot by Russian-Jewish immigrant ladies garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, it is without doubt most highly scrutinized movie of all time. I wanted to see the driver of the limo shoot the President. Or rather, I wanted to see why anyone would ever come to such a conclusion. This stemmed from an interview I’d read with the Wu Tang Clan rap group. Several Wu Tang members (maybe RZA, GZA, or the Ghostface Killah) said their favorite book was Behold a Pale Horse, by one-time naval intelligence officer turned UFO researcher and bonker conspiracist, William Cooper.
It was Cooper’s contention that the President was killed as part of vast intergalactic plot stemming from a botched deal between aliens from outer space and the Eisenhower administration. According to Cooper, the aliens wanted back their spaceship, the one that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. They were willing to make a deal. They’d give the United States advanced, “black” technology (which would later go into “sleath” weapons like the B-2 bomber) in exchange for the return of the ship plus being given free reign to abduct a finite number of Americans on whom they performed numerous physiological tests. The problem was when the Kennedy boys got in, they wanted to renegotiate the bargain, which the aliens took as an unforgivable betrayal. Kennedy’s fate was sealed. Says Cooper, the Secret Service driver of the president’s limo that day in Dallas—the true murderer—was in the employ of the aliens, or perhaps even a shapeshifting alien himself. The Wu Tang, then residing communally in a Staten Island split-level they regarded as a Shoalin Temple, said they believed this. It was all in the Zapruder film, they said, look at it, you’d see.
Seemed worth a try, especially since now you can watch a frame-by-frame breakdown of famous film on the Web. But I saw nothing that resembled the driver turning with a gun in his hand. Maybe I wasn’t stoned enough. That’s what I thought. At least until I got to the frame where Kennedy’s head explodes in a flash and shower of blood.
Forty years later, it was no less visceral—a frozen horrible, unchanging moment. One look and there I was, back in tenth-grade geometry class at Francis Lewis High School, the principal’s voice on the loudspeaker saying that the President had been shot, that he was taken to the hospital, and that he was “dead.”
Although less abrupt, that’s what it was like talking to Monica and Laurie: a reconnection to the bitter emotion of the moment, a dose of the absolute truth (their husbands are never coming back), a note to self that 9/11truth was more than a performance art mix-and-match of MIHOP-making. It was a fast-track teleportation back to the Day.
Actually this wasn’t as much of a stretch as it sounds since I actually was there, at Ground Zero, 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.
Late in the afternoon, I sat down beside another, impossibly weary firefighter. Completely covered with grayish dust that covered the area, he sat on a rock drinking a Poland Spring water. Half his squad was missing. They went into the South Tower and never came out. Then, almost as an non sequitor, the fireman looked up at the brickish-colored building in front of us, maybe three or four hundred yards away.
“That building is coming down,” he said, with a drained casualness.
“Really?” I asked. At forty-seven stories, in most other cities the building would be a skyscraper, the high point on the horizon. But in New York, especially compared to the phantasmagoria of flattened towers, it merely seemed to be a nondescript box with fire coming out of a few windows. “When?”
“I don’t know. Tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning.”
This was around 5:15 or so in the afternoon. I know because five minutes later, at 5:20 P.M., the building, which turned out to be World Trade Center #7, did come down.
“Shit!” I screamed, unsure which way to run, not that it turned out I was in any danger, since #7 appeared to drop straight down. Far enough away, it was like watching a movie. I have revisited that moment many times, as often as not in dreams.
Now the 9/11truth movement tells me that what I saw was something much, much more. According to Jim Hoffman, a mathematician and physicist who lives in Alameda, California, where he authors the site http://911research. wtc7.net, what I saw was a “classic controlled demolition,” which means WTC7 was deliberately brought down by planted explosives. This is the reason, Hoffman contends and most 9/11truth people believe, #7 fell so quickly (about 6.6 seconds, barely slower than the speed of an object free-falling in a vacuum), and so neatly, into its “own footprint.”
For the building to have collapsed that quickly without explosives, Hoffman claimed, would mean “its 58 perimeter columns and 25 central columns of structural steel would have to have been shattered at almost the same instant, which is so unlikely as to be impossible.”
The destruction of WTC7, hit by no plane, only marginally on fire, might just turn out to be the key to the entire mystery of what happened on September 11, the heart of the matter, Hoffman contended.
9/11truth advocates agree. The fact that Larry Silverstein Properties, the owner of WTC7, received $861 million dollars in insurance payouts for the building’s collapse, a nifty $500 million profit over the original $386 million investment, is far too garden variety a motive to excite many activists. But the list of WTC7 tenants on September 11, 2001, sets conspiracy heads spinning.
To wit: the IRS, Department of Defense, and CIA kept offices on twenty-fifth floor. The Secret Service occupied 9 and 10, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (home to vast paper records of ongoing bank transactions, including still-pending fraud cases) on 11–13. On the twenty-third floor was Rudy Giuliani’s oddly located Office of Emergency Management, from which the mayor planned to direct his troops during whatever crises that might befall the City. On 9/11 the office wasn’t even available for Rudy to—as he would tell delegates at the 2004 Republican Convention—grab Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik’s arm, and exclaim “Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.”
If this wasn’t enough, as of October 2000, the mortgage of WTC 7 was taken over by the Blackstone Group, headed by Pete Petersen, chairman of the New World Order stalwart Council on Foreign Relations.
In the cosmology of 9/11truth, the destruction of World Trade Center 7 is akin to Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. WTC7 was the home of secrets, a potential loose end. It had to go. Central in this is the comment made by Silverstein in a 2002 PBS documentary in which the realtor quotes himself as saying to the fire department, “We’ve had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
“Pull it,” as 9/11truth people never tire of repeating, is the term usually used for controlled demolition. Later Silverstein would later claim “pull it” meant get all the firemen out of the building. But they’d been out for hours.
These were vexing questions to be sure, especially in light of the fact that WTC7 is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report, nor is the building given much attention in “Final Report on the Collapse of WTC 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 EXPE
RT
A few days after Webster Tarpley’s lecture, I went to a Community Board #1 forum on Building Safety where the NIST report would be discussed. The meeting was held in the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest structure when it was completed in 1913. Since it was still standing, it seemed as good a place as any to talk about the only former world’s tallest building(s) to fall down.
I was tagging along with William Rodriguez, who attends all NIST meetings and brings a video camera “so they know I’m watching them.” There are people who believe their whole lives have been lived for a singular moment and purpose and William, a jovial forty-five-year-old with close-cropped black hair marked with a small streak of white “like a skunk,” is one of these people.
Growing up shining shoes in a poor section of Bayamon, Puerto Rico, William was already dreaming of the day when he would be wrapped in a straitjacket and suspended upside down by a flaming rope. “That was going to be my trick, the one that would make me famous. It was my goal to become a magician, the youngest illusionist in the Caribbean basin,” says William.
It was in P.R. that William met James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi. Once the magician on the children’s show Wonderama, Randi is best known as a debunker of supernatural claims by psychics and the like, offering the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to anyone able to demonstrate verifiable evidence of their powers. No one has yet taken him up on it.
American Gangster Page 19
