American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  That was cover-up number one by the 9/11 Commission. Now let’s look at whether it was actually those two planes that were responsible for the falling towers. I was amazed, watching the 2007 version of the documentary Loose Change (which I urge everyone to see), at the many firefighters and other eyewitnesses who talked about a whole series of explosions before and during the collapse of the buildings. All of this was reported on the news at the time. Before the South Tower collapsed, video footage clearly shows sizable amounts of white smoke starting to pour out of the base. There was described a “giant rolling ball of flame” that came up from street level; an elevator that exploded on the 65th floor as someone stood beside it; a woman on the 49th floor seeing people with burns and broken arms in the stairwells. “For every window in the lobby to be exploding ... it wasn’t from the jet fuel, no way,” according to one of the witnesses. And a whole lot more that did not jive with any plane striking the building. Barry Jennings, the city’s emergency coordinator, was at the scene before and after the building collapses. Jennings puts it out there plainly: “I know what I heard. I heard explosions.”6

  For my TV show, I interviewed a witness named William Rodriguez, a janitor who happened to have a master key and rescued many people and got honored at the White House as a national hero. He says that shortly before American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 AM, an explosion simultaneously rocked the building so hard “it pushed us up.” Rodriguez later testified behind closed doors to the 9/11 Commission, but his name was never mentioned in the report. Rodriguez also gave the commission and the FBI a list of fourteen people who’d been with him, but not a single one was ever contacted. He produced his boss for us, who looked me right in the eye and in essence told me the same story. What’s happened to Rodriguez today? He’s on the no-fly list. A guy who went back in to save people, with no regard for his own life! When he goes somewhere, he’s pulled out of the line, interrogated, harassed. All because, I guess, he didn’t give the “proper testimony” they wanted.

  Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour.7

  Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.

  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife, Terry. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.8

  Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he’s convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby Building 7:

  “Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.”9

  Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: “Once you get to the science, it’s indisputable.”10

  So what happened to the steel debris from the World Trade Center that might have backed this up? Well, for the most part it was shipped overseas. The removal by four companies contracted by the city was carefully controlled and monitored. The building assessment performance team wasn’t allowed to take samples.11 One firefighter I spoke with, who got dug out of the rubble on 9/11, said: “The one thing that always troubled me is, why were they in such a hurry to remove all the evidence? Why did they take away everything from the site as fast and expediently as possible?”

  I tried to talk to someone from the 9/11 Commission, but got turned down multiple times. They simply said, we stand by our report. I also tried to speak with Mayor Giuliani, but he refused also. We recently learned, through the D.A. of Manhattan’s testimony in a court case, that the city of New York did nothing to investigate 9/11. That tells me Giuliani was nothing but a straw man. Why is he paraded around as this big hero when he really had nothing to do with it, other than be a figurehead? Again, I ask what happened to state and local laws. Homicides are supposed to be investigated by the jurisdiction where they happen. Who has the power to suspend all those laws and make them irrelevant, turning it into an investigation completely controlled by the feds? Seems that they feel they’re above us. We work now for the government, not the other way around. That’s not the way this country was founded. I think we have a right to know who ran that investigation, so we can properly critique it.

  I wanted to ask Mayor Giuliani specifically about the collapse of Building 7, late on the afternoon of the attacks. If all these buildings are falling as a result of fires, shouldn’t we be changing the way we build them? In this case, you had Building 7 that wasn’t struck by anything. I went to the BBC and got the footage where a reporter is standing in front of it, incongruously saying that it’s already come down—almost a half-hour before it did! I tried to talk to the reporter, but the BBC turned me down, explaining that that day was extremely hectic and they’re not part of any conspiracy.

  A few hours before the attack, for some reason Building 7’s alarm system went on test status. The power was shut off and all tenants evacuated after the second plane hit. People were reporting major fires on the east, north, and west faces that covered about six of the floors. One witness, Michael Hess, reported a major explosion on the sixth floor and being trapped for 90 minutes two floors above that, until he was rescued by the fire department.

  Well
, just like the Twin Towers, the 47-story Building 7 fell symmetrically into its own footprint (in 6.5 seconds), sending the same type of pyro-plastic cloud down the surrounding streets that demolition is known to cause. Keep in mind that other nearby buildings with much worse damage never collapsed. Not Building 3, which was split in half by the South Tower’s debris. Not Building 4, otherwise almost completely destroyed. Not Buildings 5 or 6, which suffered severe fires and structure damage. And they were much smaller than Building 7, where 81 columns all had to collapse at the same time due to fires on just a few floors. So why did Building 7 come down as it did? What’s being covered up?

  I’ve got questions about the attack on the Pentagon also. Getting back to Charles Lewis and what he heard that morning on the walkie-talkies out at LAX: The security guards referred to a “missile” having hit the Pentagon. “I was kinda puzzled,” Lewis says, “because by the time the airport had been evacuated and I got home, the missile that had hit the Pentagon had mysteriously changed to being another plane. I couldn’t figure that out, because I didn’t take the FBI or the LA World Airport Police to be putting on a pageant for me.”12

  Of course, officially it was American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the ground floor at 9:37 AM. Only a section of the Pentagon that had been reinforced to withstand a terrorist attack was hit. Anywhere else, the damage and the casualties would have been much worse.13 Left behind by a plane 100-some feet wide was a hole 16 feet deep, but no evidence to accompany it, which is something that former air force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg says he’d never seen happen. Captain Wittenberg also says that jet engines do not leave a trail of white smoke, as was seen at the Pentagon. “We don’t know what it was, but you can tell what it wasn’t,” according to Wittenberg. And he believes it wasn’t a 757 aircraft.14

  Another doubter is Major General Albert Stubblebine, retired Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, who was responsible for the army’s strategic intelligence sources worldwide. “I have had a lot of experience looking at photographs,” Stubblebine says. “I don’t know exactly what hit it [the Pentagon], but I do know from the photographs I have analyzed, it was not an airplane. For one thing, if you look at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing marks on the side [of the building]. One person counteracted my theory and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got it all wrong, the airplane came across, one wing hit the ground and broke off.’ Which is possible, but if I understand airplanes correctly, most of them have two wings. So there should have been a mark for the second one.”15 Stubblebine also believes the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled demolition.

  “How could a Boeing 757, with its engines extending beneath its wings, have struck the Pentagon so low without damaging the lawn and destroying the large cable spools on the ground in front of the damaged area?” asks 9/11 expert David Ray Griffin, a California professor and the author of eight books exploring the contradictions of the official 9/11 story. Griffin also cites the observation of Karen Kwiatkowski, then an air force lieutenant colonel employed at the Pentagon, who saw “no airplane metal or cargo debris.”16

  Here’s what troubled me: the law was immediately and completely broken there. They had military personnel out on the lawn cleaning everything up, before an investigator ever arrived. Those hasty cleanups now seem to be Standard Operating Procedure when it comes to assassinations and events like 9/11, don’t they. Whenever there’s a plane crash, things are strewn about. So where are the seats, the luggage? The wings, vertical stabilizers, and engines were never fully recovered. A number of parts to a 757 are pretty much indestructible, but not a single piece has ever been positively identified as originating with Flight 77. The Department of Justice has admitted to having 85 videos, but they’ve refused a Freedom of Information Act request to release them.

  Another expert we communicated with is Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of commissioned service in the air force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member. Colonel Nelson says: “With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged.... In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft—and in most cases the precise cause of the accident.”17

  Then there’s the background on the pilot. His name was Charles “Chic” Burlingame, and he was not only well-schooled in martial arts, but a retired Top Gun pilot, the best of the best. All his friends said there’s no way he’d give up his plane, it wasn’t in the man’s makeup. Unless the hijackers got to him and killed him—but with box cutters? Supposedly, a hijacker named Hanjour got control of the plane. Except, later, his flight instructor described Hanjour as barely being able to handle a single-engine Cessna a month earlier. And Flight 77 is said to have made a complicated 330-degree turn, dropping 7,000 feet, executing a maneuver that experienced pilots say is nearly impossible.18

  The section of the Pentagon that was struck happened to be the headquarters for naval operations and intelligence, as well as housing quite a few accountants and budget analysts. Important Pentagon financial information disappeared in the aftermath of the attack.19 So it’s quite a coincidence that, just the day before, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had announced publicly: “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.”20 That’s right, not million, not even billion, that was trillion.

  Flight 77 disappeared from the FAA radar screen at 8:56 AM, when it made an unauthorized turn to the south somewhere near the Kentucky-Ohio border. The only evidence that the plane was still flying and headed toward Washington were two phone calls that Ted Olson said he received from his wife Barbara onboard, not long before the Pentagon strike. Ted Olson was a longtime Republican operative who spearheaded the legal effort for Bush in Florida after the disputed 2000 election, and then went to work in the Justice Department as Solicitor General. His wife was the only person who’s reported to have mentioned box cutters. According to Olson, she said that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers.” Yup, 60-some people (including a weightlifter pilot), being held off by a few short, slender guys holding knives and boxcutters.

  At first, Olson said the calls were made from Barbara’s cell phone. Except, high-altitude cell phone calls were pretty much impossible in 2001. Olson then changed his story to claim she’d used an onboard phone to make a collect call. Except, American Airlines didn’t have such phones on the Boeing 757s. Here’s what the FBI reported in 2006, at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker): Barbara Olson made only one call, an “unconnected call” that lasted “0 seconds.”21

  So what’s going on? Captain Wittenberg has said that, if Flight 77 was actually off the radar screen for 36 minutes, then it was no longer airborne. 22 Did it land in some remote field, while something else—maybe the missile Charles Lewis heard about at LAX—hit the Pentagon’s financial records area?

  This probably sounds far-fetched, if not crazy, until you consider that elements of our military had an eerily similar plan ready to roll back in the early 1960s. It was called Operation Northwoods, first described in a book published in 2001, Body of Secrets by James Bamford. Operation Northwoods was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for action against Castro’s Cuba—“what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” as Bamford put it. The Kennedy brothers seemed to be going soft on Castro, so the generals came up with a number of “terrorist” schemes to launch a war.

  Bamford tells us: “Among the most elaborate schemes was to ‘create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked an
d shot down a chartered civil airliner.’... An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft.... At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

  “From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the internal distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal.”23 If you’re interested, you can read the whole plan on the Web site of the National Security Archive.

  Now let’s examine the anomalies around the last plane, United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, reportedly at 10:03 AM and 20 minutes away from Washington. The official story made me proud to be an American: The passengers overcame the hijackers and sacrificed their lives, so that others might be spared. Back to Charles Lewis again at LAX that morning: “They said fighter jets had been scrambled from two different military bases, and that they had shot down the plane over Pennsylvania. And that was way before we got the hero story.”24