The 9/11 Commission and its final report are still held up as the final word on the events of September 11, 2001. But there’s just one problem: Six out of the 10 commissioners have admitted that the commission was misled, stymied, hampered by conflicts of interest, and, ultimately, forced to participate in a politically-motivated cover-up. This is the story of the doubtful 9/11 commissioners.
To watch the full 9/11 Whistleblowers series, please CLICK HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
Of all the 9/11 whistleblowers, perhaps the most noteworthy are the 9/11 Commissioners themselves.
The 9/11 Commission (formally “The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States”) was set up by President George W. Bush, who dragged his heels a full 441 days before finally establishing a body to investigate the events of September 11, 2001, and “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding” them. But that remarkable gap between the events and the empaneling of the Commission was not due to mere laziness; Bush actively resisted any investigation for as long as he could, taking the extraordinary and unprecedented step of personally asking Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congress’ investigation into those events.
It was only when the political pressure to form a commission of inquiry became too great for Bush to resist that he authorized the commission and nominated a chairman: Henry Kissinger.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Today I’m pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman: Dr. Henry Kissinger.
REPORTER: Dr. Kissinger, do you have any concerns about once the commission begins it work and fingers point to valuable allies—say, Saudi Arabia for example—what policy implications could this have for the United States, particularly at this delicate time?
HENRY KISSINGER: I have been given every assurance by the President that we should go where the facts lead us.
Kissinger’s reputation as a cover-up artist and tool of the political establishment was such that even The New York Times speculated that Bush’s nomination of him showed that the president wanted to contain the investigation into 9/11, not enable it. 9/11 victims’ family members, similarly concerned that Kissinger was being appointed to run a cover-up commission, challenged him to his face to release the client list of his political consulting business.
NARRATOR: Several family members approached Kissinger and requested a meeting at his office in New York. Prior to the meeting, Kristen Breitweiser conducted a thorough investigation of Kissinger’s potential conflicts of interest.
PATTY CASAZZA: Probably much to the chagrin of some of the people in the room, Lorie (Van Auken) asked some very pointed questions. “Would you have any Saudi-Amercian clients that you would like to tell us about?” And he was very uncomfortable, kind of twisting and turning on the couch. And then she asked, “whether he had any clients by the name of Bin-Laden?”And he just about fell off his couch.
NEWS REPORTER: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, stepped down from the position Friday.
MINDY KLEINBERG: We thought the meeting went well.
The next morning, Kissinger resigned his post as head of the 9/11 Commission and former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton were appointed chairman and vice-chairman, respectively, to take his place.
Remarkably, the suggestions of political cover-up did not end there, nor were they confined to a marginalized “lunatic fringe” of “conspiracy theorists” derided by the establishment media. The remarkable and almost completely unreported fact is that six out of the 10 commissioners—Kean and Hamilton, as well as Bob Kerrey, Tim Roemer, John Lehman and Max Cleland—have all expressed concern that the commission was misled, stymied, hampered by conflicts of interest, and, ultimately, forced to participate in a politically-motivated cover-up.
In their book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and in press conferences and interviews at the time the report was released, Kean and Hamilton famously remarked that the commission had been “set up to fail.”
EVAN SOLOMON: Even Lee Hamilton, the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission itself, admits to us that the process he headed up was seriously flawed.
LEE HAMILTON: So there are all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail. We got started late. We had a very short time frame; indeed we had to get it extended. We did not have enough money. They were afraid we were going to hang somebody.
As it turns out, the majority of the commissioners felt that the commission had been lied to, deliberately obstructed, undermined by the White House, or set up with staff that had conflicts of interest in the investigation.
One of these concerned commissioners, Max Cleland, resigned because the commission had been “deliberately compromised by the president of the United States.”
Commissioner John Lehman, meanwhile, admitted on NBC Nightly News that the commission had to go through Karl Rove and other senior White House members to access key documents in their investigation and that “We purposely put together a staff that had – in a way – conflicts of interest,” stressing, lest there be any doubt, that “All of the staff had, to a certain extent, some conflict of interest.”
Commission members even considered bringing criminal charges against Pentagon officials who had deliberately lied to them about the military’s complete lack of response on that day.
But perhaps the most cryptic of all the dissenting commisioners was Bob Kerrey. In 2009 he remarked that 9/11 was a “30-year old conspiracy,” but no mainstream reporter has ever followed up with him to clarify this statement.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: Do you support a criminal investigation into 9/11? Because I know yours was an exposition. It was not a criminal investigation.
BOB KERREY: I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I mean, I do support a permanent commission to examine not just that but lots of other things in this area.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: But if it’s a permanent cover-up then it’s—I mean, if it an act of war and it’s hiding things—which everyone on your commission knew, that the Pentagon was changing their stories, lying to you—then it’s a cover up of an act of war, and under Article 3 Section 3 of the constitution it’s treason. So unless we get to the very bottom of it then we’re still talking a treasonous exposition.
KERREY: This is a longer conversation, I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.
ROTHE-KUSHEL: We have to or we can’t save our country, sir.
KERREY: I don’t think—Well, if that’s the that’s the condition upon which we’re going to be saving our country—Because the problem is, it’s a 30 year old conspiracy.
It is utterly remarkable that the 9/11 Commission and its final report are still held up as the final word on the events of September 11, 2001, when a majority of its own commissioners admit that the commission was a cover up and did not get to the bottom of the story. Even more remarkable is that this fact has never even been mentioned, let alone examined, in any mainstream media report. And, despite the fact that the majority of Americans believe the government is concealing what it knows about the events of September 11th from the public, to this day anyone who raises questions about the commission or its findings is treated as a conspiratorial loony by those same media personalities that refuse to report on the 9/11 Commission’s own whistleblowers.
It should be apparent by this point that the old argument that “someone would have talked” is not just fallacious, but factually incorrect. There have, in fact, been numerous whistleblowers with documentable evidence of the frauds and fictions that have been constructed around the official 9/11 narrative. Their disclosures put the “But someone would have talked” doubters in an uncomfortable predicament: Either they are lazy—boldly pronouncing on issues they have not themselves bothered to investigate—or they are lying.
What is especially galling when the so-called “skeptics” use the “someone would have talked” fallacy is that the whistleblowers have in fact done everything possible to publicize their stories—holding press conferences, filing formal appeals, joining whistleblower organizations, and making themselves available for interviews. For their heroic efforts, these brave men and women have been fired from their jobs, shunned by former colleagues, smeared by the mainstream media, and ignored by the public.
“Someone would have talked.” Indeed, numerous “someones” have talked. Some of them have even screamed. But when their cries are ignored, the stories of the 9/11 whistleblowers sound like the proverbial trees falling in the forest with no one around to hear them. Unless and until we give these valiant men and women a voice, then we will never hope to learn the truth about 9/11.
Today the event that defined the United States’ foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice.
While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter.
Yet, with 18 years having come and gone — and with the tireless efforts from victims’ families, first responders, scientists and engineers — the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the “official story” of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil.
For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks.
While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to “never forget,” the commissioners’ call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause:
Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries — not just airplanes and the ensuing fires — caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;”
In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as “conspiracy theorists” for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.
Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting’s conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway.
“We’re a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force,” Gioia said. “We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won’t be the last,” he added.
While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was “set up to fail” from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day.
For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the “official” report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks.
Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the “official story” say were deliberately kept from them.
Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in
Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners’ call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building — World Trade Center Building 7 — also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or “Building 7,” was never struck by a plane.
It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a “secret office” in WTC 7 and that, after the building’s destruction, “a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers.” WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers.
Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites “uncontrolled building fires” as leading to the building’s destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new poll conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and released on Monday.
That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building’s fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn’t know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed.
Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public “goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to ‘office fires,’ everyone in the country would have heard about it.”
The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that “the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them,” as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.
Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported, while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District’s recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7’s collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.
The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7’s collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from “the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires.
The study, currently available as a draft, concluded that “uncontrolled building fires” did not lead the building to fall into its footprint — tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse — as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study — authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan — found that “fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse,” while also concluding “that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
This “near-simultaneous failure of every column” in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7’s collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.
Still “crazy” after all these years?
Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal.
Yet, this 9/11 anniversary — with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation — is it still “crazy” to be skeptical of the official story?
Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more “off limits,” it was often first responders, survivors and victims’ families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades — not wild-eyed “conspiracy theorists,” as many have claimed.
The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American.
However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims’ families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, “Never Forget” has been nearly synonymous with “Never Question.”
Yet, failing to ask those questions — even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7’s collapse — is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
A solid majority of Americans who watch the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on video don’t buy the government’s story that fires brought it down, according to a new survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth).
After viewing video footage of the controversial building collapse from four different angles, 52% of Americans who participated in the survey are either sure or suspect it was caused by a controlled demolition, compared to 21% who are sure or suspect it was caused by ordinary fires. A sizable 27% say they don’t know.
By a similar margin, 51% who see the collapse say they are more inclined to believe the critics who argue that only the use of explosives in a controlled demolition can account for Building 7’s collapse, versus 20% who say they are more inclined to believe the government’s conclusion that fires caused the collapse. (To define “critics,” the survey references a group of 3,000 architects and engineers who have disputed the government’s report as well as researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who performed computer modeling of Building 7’s collapse and also concluded that fires could not have caused the collapse).
By a substantial 3-to-1 margin, 48% say they would support a new investigation into Building 7’s collapse (24% strongly support, 24% support) compared with just 15% who say they would oppose a new investigation (6% strongly oppose, 9% oppose). Meanwhile, 28% say they neither support nor oppose a new investigation, and 9% say they don’t know.
“The lopsided margin between those who suspect it was explosives and those who suspect it was fires really begs the question as to how and why this issue has been marginalized for so long,” said Ted Walter, who is director of strategy for AE911Truth. “Clearly, if the media were to do its job and provide the most basic information about 9/11 to the American people — or if a few elected officials started talking seriously about Building 7 — the public would be up in arms demanding a new investigation.”
Underscoring the absence of media coverage of Building 7, only 64% of participants said they were aware of a third skyscraper collapsing on 9/11 — and just 14% could name the building.
Last week, AE911Truth, along with researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, released the draft report of a four-year computer modeling study of the tower’s collapse. “The report confirms what most Americans suspect when they see the collapse,” said Walter. “Building 7 did not come down from fires.”
“The US government story is Achilles’ heel in the official version of” the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003.
Dr. Barrett, a founding member of the Scientific Panel for the Investigation of 9/11, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday following the release of a comprehensive study conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in association with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth which found that fire was not the cause of the collapse of the Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC).
The US official story established that the 47-story building collapsed on its base after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, at 5:20 p.m., when it was affected by the fire coming from the Twin Towers—Buildings 1 and 2 of the World Trade Center. The building was completely destroyed in just seven seconds.
However, after investing four years in computer simulations, the UAF scientists published a draft report that concludes that the collapse of the third WTC skyscraper on Sept.11, 2001 was not due to any fire, but “the almost simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
Dr. Barrett said, “A new study from the University of Alaska led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey has determined with total precision that the destruction of the World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001 could not have happened the way the government tells us which is due to moderate office fire, that’s actually very minor office fire.”
“The US government story is Achilles’ heel in the official version of 9/11 which is ridiculous in many, many respects. Every single aspect of the official story collapses upon critical examination. The Building 7 is the most obviously false aspect of this,” he stated.
“So the new study takes on the NIST report; the official government body has worked up a bizarre claim that this very modest office fire…has caused the 47-story building to come down at absolute freefall for two and hand a half seconds and then close to freefall for the rest of the way down straight into its own footprints,” he noted.
The September, 11, 2001 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.
US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account.
They believe that rogue elements within the US government, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.
As a janitor holding a master key to the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, William Rodriguez risked his life till the very moment of the building’s destruction helping those trapped inside the Towers to escape. But carefully curated from most mainstream reports on Rodriguez’ remarkarble story is an equally remarkable fact: This 9/11 hero is in fact a 9/11 whistleblower, someone who has contradicted the official story of the September 11th attacks from day one. This is his story.
To watch the full 9/11 Whistleblowers series, please CLICK HERE.
TRANSCRIPT
When people talk of the bravery exhibited by ordinary men and women during the traumatic hours of the 9/11 attacks, they are talking about people like William Rodriguez. Indeed, of the many stories of selflessness and courage to have emerged from that fateful day, it would be difficult to find one more heroic than that of William Rodriguez, dubbed the “last man out” because, as a janitor holding a master key to the buildings, he risked his life till the very moment of the Tower’s destruction helping those trapped inside the Towers to escape.
RAMON TAYLOR: William Rodriguez was working as a janitor at the World Trade Center when the towers were attacked. Using a master key, he ran to open as many doors as he could before exiting and becoming buried alive.
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ: So they started looking under the rubble, and once I got pulled from under the rubble I was—After, I was in shock. Why? Because I couldn’t find any of those buildings.
WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ: We went up by the stairs with the Port Authority police to start rescuing people. A lot of people were coming out, but there was a lot of people that stayed there. And we brought a lot of people on wheelchairs and a lot of people on gurneys, all [the] people that couldn’t make it because there was no elevator service. The elevator went out.
REPORTER: The World Trade Center towers were built as a class “A” building. That means that, in the case of a fire, every third floor in both towers is closed to prevent a backdraft. It is the reason that Rodriguez’ master key was so crucial to getting people out.
RODRIGUEZ: It was hard. The amount of heat that was generated because of the fire was coming down. The smoke . . . It was an acrid smoke because you could feel it on your throat.
REPORTER: He saw firefighters carrying a hundred pounds’ worth of equipment on their backs waiting for a freight elevator that would never come. That elevator was demolished. So Rodriguez led them up another way, using a back pathway that only he knew. After the sky lobby collapsed he finally listened to police who told him to get out. He was not prepared for what he was about to see.
RODRIGUEZ: When I look around I find all the bodies of the people that jump out of the building. They came out of the building and they say “I saved myself!” And a piece of debris came in and killed them.
As one of the heroes of that day, a man whose story encapsulates all the tragedy and drama of 9/11, William Rodriguez is no stranger to the glare of the media spotlight. Not only has he been interviewed for dozens of news programs and reports on the events of September 11, 2001, and been featured as a spokesman for the survivors at multiple events and on many reports, he has also been awarded for his courage that day and even invited to a White House dinner where he was honored by President Bush for his bravery.
But carefully curated from most mainstream reports on Rodriguez’ remarkarble story is an equally remarkable fact: This 9/11 hero is in fact a 9/11 whistleblower, someone who has contradicted the official story of the September 11th attacks from day one. According to Rodriguez, the first explosion that he felt that day was not the impact of the plane nearly 100 stories above him, but an explosion below him, from one of the sub-basement levels.
RODRIGUEZ: That morning I was supposed to be there at 8 o’clock in the morning every day. I called my supervisor because I was not going to work I was gonna take a sick day. Made it there at 8:30 in the morning, go straight to the lobby, down to the basement.
The building has six sub-levels of basement: B1, B2 . . . all the way down to b6. Basement six, basement five, all the way up to basement one were all Port Authority areas. Some of them have parking for tenants, some of them have storage. B1 office . . . B1 level is where they have the support office for my company, the cleaning company, American Building Maintenance.
So I was talking to the supervisor, and at 8:46 we hear “BOOM!” An explosion so hard that pushed us upwards in the air. Upwards. And it came out from below us. From the mechanical room that was right below us. And it was so loud and so powerful that all the walls cracked, the false ceiling fell on top of us, the sprinkler system got activated, and everybody started screaming so loud because they didn’t know what was going on.
And the first thing I’m going to say is that a generator just blew up on the B2 level—the level below me. And everybody’s screaming. And when I’m going to verbalize it, six to seven seconds after, we hear “BAH!” The impact all the way on the top of the building of the plane.
Two different events separated by almost seven seconds. Separated by time. And now, I work in the building for 20 years. I know the difference of the sound coming from the top and one from the bottom.
So when everybody started—”What the heck is going on?”—a person comes running into the office saying “Explosion! Explosion!” His hands extended, all the skin pulled from under his armpits on both arms. Hanging! And we thought it was clothing—it was part of his clothes—until he gets closer. He was coming like this, like a zombie. “Explosion! Explosion!” And when I looked at him, I realized it was his skin. Like when you take off a glove and you let it hang. And when I get to see his face, all this part was hanging off his face and everybody started screaming in horror. And I say “Don’t move!” The guy was a black guy named Felipe David. Worked for a company called Aramark.
Rodriguez’ story provides startling and credible eyewitness testimony that undermines the official myth that there were no explosives in the Twin Towers that morning. Rodriguez is insistent on a number of points: That there was a loud and distinct noise at 8:46 AM, that it came from beneath them in the sub-basement level and blew them upwards, and that it noticeably preceded the sound of the plane impact above them. This has led Rodriguez to conclude that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before the plane impacted the North Tower, something which the 9/11 Commission and other official government investigations into the attacks denies.
And, importantly, Rodriguez has been telling this same story—including the same detail about Felipe David—since the day of 9/11 itself.
AARON BROWN: William Rodriguez is a maintenance worker at the Trade Center, I believe. In any case, he’s on the phone with us now. Mr. Rodriguez, can you hear me?
RODRIGUEZ: Yes, I can hear you clearly.
BROWN: Tell me where you were when—well, which of the two buildings were you in?
RODRIGUEZ: I work on the Building One. The one that got hit the first time.
BROWN: Tell me what happened.
RODRIGUEZ: I was on the basement, which is a support floor for the maintenance company. And we hear like a big rumble—not like an impact, like a rumble—like something . . . like moving furniture on a massive way. And all of a sudden we hear another rumble and a guy comes running—running—into our office, and all his skin was off his body. All his skin. We went crazy. We started screaming. We told him to get out. We took everybody out of the office, outside to the loading dock area. And then I went back in. And when I went back in I saw people—I heard people that were stuck on an elevator—on a freight elevator, because all the elevators went down. And water was going in and they were probably getting drowned. And we get a couple of pipes and open the elevator and we got the people out.
If it were only William Rodriguez who heard, saw and experienced explosions inside the Twin Towers that morning, then such testimony would be easy enough to rationalize away. Maybe Rodriguez had become confused in the chaos of that morning. Maybe he had interpreted the sound and explosion incorrectly. Maybe he was lying to gain attention.
But William Rodriguez is not the only person who heard, saw and experienced explosions inside the Twin Towers that morning. In fact, hundreds of people, including office workers, police, firefighters and others have reported explosions all throughout the morning, from before the moment of plane impact all the way up to the explosive demolition of the towers themselves.
FEMALE BYSTANDER: What was it like?
TYRONE JOHNSON (FDNY LADDER 24): Horrible. The whole building just collapsed on us. Inside the lobby.
MALE BYSTANDER: Was that a secondary explosion?
JOHNSON: Yes, it was. Definitely a secondary explosion. We was inside waiting to go upstairs and on our way upstairs the whole fucking thing blew. And it just collapsed on everybody inside of the lobby.
MALE BYSTANDER: That must be the first tower coming down—
JOHNSON: I don’t know about the first one, but the second one . . . It was terrible. Then there was a third one, too, after that one.
MALE BYSTANDER: There was an explosion after that?
JOHNSON: Yes, there was. Everybody was just inside the building, waiting to go upstairs and it just let loose. Everything just let loose inside the building.
MALE BYSTANDER: So what you’re telling me is that there was the plane or whatever hit the building, then a secondary explosion—
JOHNSON: There was like three explosions after that. We came in after the fire—We came when the fire was going on already. We was in the staging area inside the building, waiting to go upstairs. And then an explosion. The whole lobby collapsed on the lobby inside.
KENNY JOHANNEMAN: Yes, I was right there. I was in the B—I was down in the basement. Came down. All of a sudden the elevator blew up. Smoke. I dragged a guy out. His skin was hanging off and I dragged him out. And I helped him out to the ambulance.
REPORTER: Arthur Del Bianco is one of the lucky few, able to tell a tale of survival from a hospital bed.
ARTHUR DEL BIANCO: All of a sudden there was, like, “BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!” Like bullet shots. And then, all of a sudden, three tremendous explosions and everything started coming down.
EYEWITNESS: I think a bomb went off in the lobby first, then a plane hit the building. Then another plane hit the other building. But when I was coming through the doors on the other side of the Trade Center, something—either they blew the lobby up, or something. Because it blew the glass out of the doors and knocked us all down and I got a—smoke and everything on me.
These stories, collected haphazardly by reporters at the scene that day, paint a very different picture of 9/11 than that portrayed by NIST and the 9/11 Commission. Rather than a progressive collapse due to fire and burning jet fuel, these stories suggest that what was happening inside the Twin Towers that morning was in fact a series of explosive events. Explosive events that were powerful enough to cause internal collapses within the building well below the point of the plane impact and fires, and even, according to multiple witnesses, events that preceded the impact of the plane.
But is there more systematic and rigorously collected evidence of these explosions? Is there a repository of such testimony that would confirm what Rodriguez and many others have affirmed since the day of 9/11 itself: Namely, that there were explosions taking place inside the buildings that morning?
In fact, there is such a repository. In the wake of 9/11, New York Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen ordered the collection of oral testimony from firefighters, paramedics and emergency medical technicians who responded to the attacks that morning. That collection, amounting to more than 12,000 pages of testimony from 503 people, was then promptly sealed. It took a lawsuit and four years of court battle for the collection to be finally released to the public.
One of the researchers who spent time poring over that testimony was Graeme Macqueen, a retired associate professor at McMaster University and the Former Director of that university’s Peace Studies Center. What he found in that repository of oral history, and presented in a scholarly article for The Journal of 9/11 Studies, was an unmistakable pattern: Time after time, these first responders reported experiencing explosions in the Twin Towers. Explosions that cannot be accounted for in NIST’s official explanation of the towers’ destruction.
GRAME MACQUEEN: There is other eyewitness explosion evidence that corroborates Rodriguez, at least in a general way. Meaning that there were people talking about explosions in the basement. There were lots of people talking about tremendous explosions and fire in some of the elevators—blowing the doors off elevators.
And some of this testimony can be found on the internet. I found some of it in the FDNY oral histories. You know, firefighters talking about the doors being blown off elevators.
And so there was some kind of very destructive event. Also the windows in the lobby, which were very strong windows, were blown out by the time most of the firefighters got there. And as one of them said it looked like a plane hit the lobby.
There were other explosions that went off over the next hour or so, before the buildings started to come down. And when they came down, there were patterns of explosion from around the point of plane impact all the way down. Apparently we were supposed to believe that the building was coming down because of structural failure. But again, these were timed very well to go off in a particular way.
This is one of the reasons we know that these were explosions and that this was a controlled demolition. There were patterns. And they were explosions that were extremely strong, taking out these massive buildings and pulverizing them in less than 20 seconds. This was not structural failure.
Rodriguez’ story was not some fanciful invention that he spun during the most dramatic and horrific hours of his life; it is a story that fits into a pattern of explosive testimony related by many other witnesses that day. It is also a story that is deeply uncomfortable for those in the government and the media who were eager to celebrate the acts of bravery New Yorkers committed that day, but who will never report the explosive truth about the events at the World Trade Center that demolish the official government conspiracy theory of 9/11.
It is remarkable that Rodriguez, immediately recognized and celebrated for his heroism on that day, would continue to insist on his story even as the official story—the one that insisted there were no explosives used that day—began to take shape. But he did. For years, Rodriguez used his speaking opportunities on mainstream media and at memorials and commemoration events to inform the public about explosions in the Twin Towers that morning.
Unsurprisingly, despite the attention and accolades he received for his remarkable story in the early days of 9/11, he soon found himself becoming persona non grata in the mainstream media because he refused to go along with the official lies about what happened that morning.
RODRIGUEZ: It says, “Safety Fire Department of New York.”
ANASTASIA CHURKINA: A rescue jacket he wore over his torn shirt. A lantern from the rubble.
RODRIGUEZ: It doesn’t work, but another memory from 9/11.
CHURKINA: And a piece of marble from high up on the 44th floor. This saved for a decade.
RODRIGUEZ: I put it in my pocket because it was just such a shocking realization.
CHURKINA: As well as memories that he relives every single day.
RODRIGUEZ: And I was pulled on the rubble and I started looking for all the people and I only found pieces of human beings.
CHURKINA: William Rodriguez, a janitor in the twin towers for almost 20 years and 9/11 survivor who saved hundreds of lives on September 11th by unlocking door after door for firefighters and dragging out at least a dozen people with his own bare hands. Known as the “last man out” before the World Trade Center collapsed, his unlikely story had the media glued to him like bees to honey. Becoming a voice for the victims, Rodriguez was honored as an American hero only to be left homeless in the aftermath of the tragedy.
RODRIGUEZ: Funny thing: I will give the 800 number on camera, and when I called the 800 number they denied me the help.
CHURKINA: And shunned by the mainstream media soon after.
RODRIGUEZ: Censorship. I believe that censorship started from the very beginning, because when I was telling my story they told me, “Oh, cut this out. Cut this out.”
CHURKINA: No longer sweetheart of American broadcasts, William now talks mostly to foreign outlets. The reason: His version of 9/11 differed from the official scenario.
NEWS REPORT: It was the first hijacked plane that hit the—
RODRIGUEZ: “It was the first hijacked plane.” No, hello! That was an explosion before the plane hit the tower.
Even more remarkably, Rodriguez went beyond simply telling the truth about what he witnessed that day.
Little known even to those who are familiar with his story is that Rodriguez has used his notoriety and media opportunities to advocate for 9/11 survivors who are suffering from the health effects incurred in the aftermath of the towers’ destruction. He has even taken the fight for 9/11 truth to the political arena, forcing the government’s hand in convening a public commission to investigate the attacks, something that the Bush administration fought tooth and nail to prevent.
RODRIGUEZ: The 9/11 Commission is a book of 576 pages . . . 576 pages of lies. Because the 9/11 Commission exists because I went with three other people to Congress to ask that we wanted a formal investigation of the events of 9/11. And you may remember that the president said “We don’t need an investigation. We know who did it.” That was the wrong thing to say to the families. We had the right and we wanted to know. So we pressed for an investigation. They didn’t want it.
So we used a technique that they have used against a lot of the people with the excuse of the war. We put widows, we put wives, we put fathers that love their loved ones on every television show and every news network to ask for an investigation. And they couldn’t handle the emotional toll that that will create on the American public. So we got the investigation.
I testified behind closed doors. They didn’t want me to do the testimony in an open hearing. Everything else—everybody else—open hearings. You saw the hearings. Mine was behind closed—I agreed because I did not know what was the process and I thought up to that point that they were going to do the right thing.
We created a family steering committee and we gave the Commission 168 questions to answer. We only have 22 of those questions answered. We wanted to have a family member to be part of the Commission and they say, “We don’t want to allow that because they will have access to national security papers” and a lot of flim-flam and baloney. We never got it. So we have to press for questions to be answered. We never get those answers.
Up to that point we thought that they were going to do the right thing. The final report shows up . . . What a surprise! My whole testimony was omitted. It doesn’t appear. 27 people that I gave them to interrogate, they didn’t call them. Not even one of them.
That the 9/11 Commission’s work was subverted and undermined by conflicts of interest and deliberate cover-up is perhaps to be expected. But the efforts of people like William Rodriguez have been instrumental in advocating for those left quite literally in the dust of 9/11. Those whose stories are too problematic for the official 9/11 narrative to be given any credence or attention.
As Graeme Macqueen points out, the story told by William Rodriguez and the other witnesses to explosions in the Twin Towers that day is not a peripheral issue or a minor footnote in the story of 9/11. On the contrary, it is of central importance. Either Rodriguez and the other witnesses to explosions independent of the planes and fires are wrong, or they are right. And if they are right, we are forced to the conclusion that the official story of 9/11 is not just mistaken, but that it is a deliberate fraud that has been perpetrated on the American public—and the broader public around the world—for nearly two decades.
MACQUEEN: Well, that would obviously indicate that somehow this building was wired for explosions and that there had been a plan made in advance of the plane attacks to destroy this building. And that means the official story about, you know, Mohammed Atta and the other 18 hijackers flying planes is an incorrect story.
That indicates that there was—to use the classic word—an inside job. Somehow, insiders—deep insiders—got in the building and readied it for annihilation on that day. And that also indicates that the story we’ve been told is false, and really knowingly false. Because, of course, Rodriguez and many other eyewitnesses to explosions were ignored, or silenced, or lied about by the official investigating agencies. Which means that the whole 9/11 story is a fraud.
Ultimately, the story of Rodriguez is important, not just for what it tells us about the official 9/11 narrative, or even for what it tells us about the way that power operates in society. It is important because it shows us what ordinary men and women are capable of in extreme situations. It reminds us that, in times of distress, we are still capable of coming together to help those around us. And it provides us with an example of someone who will not stop telling his truth, even when it becomes unpopular.
RODRIGUEZ: Our wounds are still open. We’re still hurting. We’re still going through the process of traumatic shock syndrome—PTSD.
You call me a hero, I call myself a survivor. For me, the heroes died on 9/11 in my opinion because they died helping others. I just had the only tool available for me at that time to do great things, so I was—I’m a survivor. I have that survival skill. Why did I survive and my friends didn’t?
And now 16 years after it hits me stronger because I see the families. I see new families that came out from people that I saved and I always wonder, you know, what would have happened if those people that I lost—those 200 friends—will be alive today. It hits you. It hits you hard. So 16 years after, we’re still dealing with the backlash of what happened on that day.
9/11 changed me. It changed the world. We all know that. But it changed me in more ways than I expected.
In 2001, Barry Jennings was the Deputy Director of Emergency Services for the New York City Housing Authority. After being called to World Trade Center Building 7 to help coordinate the emergency response on the morning of 9/11, he was trapped in the building for hours by a series of explosions that—according to the official government conspiracy theory—never happened. This is his story.
To watch the full 9/11 Whistleblowers series, please DTube.
TRANSCRIPT
JEFF ROSSEN: So now they’re walking back toward the World Trade Center and as we keep letting you hear the personal stories the survivor stories of exactly what happened inside the World Trade Center on that first plane went in and of course the collapses since then. We’re going to bring more of those to you now. Barry Jennings, you were on the eighth floor. You work for the City housing department. Explain to me the moment of impact.
BARRY JENNINGS: Well, me and Hess, the Corporation Counsel, were on the 23rd floor. I told him, ‘We gotta get out of here.’ We started walking down the stairs. We made it to the eighth floor [later clarified to be the sixth floor]. Big explosion! Blew us back into the eighth floor. And I turned to Hess and I said, ‘This is it, we’re dead. We’re not gonna make it outta here…
I took a fire extinguisher and I bust the window out. This gentlemen, he heard my cries for help. This gentleman right here. And he said kept saying stand by somebody’s coming to get you they could they couldn’t get to us for now because they couldn’t find us you thought that was it I thought I go we’re dead I thought that was it I started praying to allies that that’s it we’re going
In 2001, Barry Jennings was the Deputy Director of Emergency Services for the New York City Housing Authority. After the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 AM on the morning of 9/11, Jennings was called to the city’s Office of Emergency Management in World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) along with Corporation Counsel Michael Hess to help coordinate the emergency response. Entering Building 7 together before the strike on the South Tower at 9:03 AM, Jennings and Hess were surprised to discover that the office had been abandoned. Receiving a phone call from his superior, Jennings was warned to leave the building immediately. Descending via the stairwell, Jennings and Hess reached the sixth floor before an explosion blew them back up to the eighth floor, trapping them inside the building. After hours of chaos and confusion, including the collapse of the Twin Towers and repeated attempts to draw the attention of first responders, the pair were finally rescued by firefighters.
Hours later, World Trade Center Building 7, also known as the Salomon Brothers building, collapsed at freefall acceleration directly into the path of most resistance. After seven years of investigation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) determined that the building had not come down due to explosives or controlled demolition, as many alleged, or due to structural damage from the collapse of the Twin Towers, an explosion in the building’s fuel oil systems, or any of the other suggestions that had been put forward and retracted by NIST over the course of its investigation. Instead, NIST spokesman Shyam Sunder insisted that the building had collapsed due to ordinary office fires.
SHYAM SUNDER: The collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11 was a rare event. Our study has identified thermal expansion as a new phenomenon that can cause the collapse of the structure. For the first time we have shown that fire can induce a progressive collapse.
Jennings’ remarkable story was captured by Jeff Rossen, reporting on the ground for WABC TV, just moments after he and Hess had been rescued from the building. But it wasn’t until several years later that Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas, the creators of Loose Change—the first viral internet documentary—discovered the clip of that interview from the day of 9/11 and realized that Jennings’ testimony was one of the few eyewitness accounts of one of the deepest mysteries of that day: The destruction of WTC 7.
JASON BERMAS: So while we were doing research for, obviously, our next cut of the film, Loose Change: Final Cut—you know, Loose Change Second Edition gave us a real opportunity to go around doing investigation. And we had had so much archived footage sent to us, because this was long before the days of the internet where you get something high-quality on the spot. And Dylan found footage of Barry Jennings that had been unedited that we had not seen that really suggested that he was absolutely in Building Seven.
And we also correlated that with him being with Michael Hess. And Michael Hess was the right-hand man of Giuliani. He was the city corporation counsel. Here’s a still shot of him behind me. And then you can see him here sitting next to Giuliani, so pretty much as close as it gets. And, you know, we made this connection. And actually I had reached out to Hess via email. I heard nothing back—and to, you know, the proper parties, nothing back.
But Dylan tracked down Barry Jennings in his city office and Barry did respond. And Barry said, “Come on down!” So me and Dylan went down with the camera, and once we got in there and started talking to him I remember like the first thing that I saw—you know, he was obviously, I’d say, not the highest up guy, but very—you know, he had his own office, he was well respected. He had the key to the city. You know, he had talked about the key to the city after this event and he even told us how he had seen Loose Change Second Edition. Basically, what I can remember: He was pretty sympathetic to our cause. He talked to us about Fahrenheit 9/11.
And from there we tried to find a spot to get him, and I remember he drove us out there. We were in the back, one of his suits hanging up. I remember we even talked about his family, you know, being out in Long Island. Very friendly guy. And we got him on the pier.
And listen: The interview is what it is. We’ve released it in full. We didn’t add anything. We didn’t coherse the guy. And I think what he says is about as telling as it gets.
“As telling as it gets.”
Indeed, Barry Jennings’ story is telling. As the only documented eyewitness testimony of the events taking place inside World Trade Center 7 during the hours of the attack, the accounts of Barry Jennings and Michael Hess are essential to coming to an understanding of the destruction of the building. And, most telling of all, it contradicts the official, government-approved story of Building 7’s destruction in many important ways.
BARRY JENNINGS: As I told you guys before it was very, very funny. I was on my way to work and the traffic was excellent, I received a call that a small Cessna had hit the World Trade Center. I was asked to go and man the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) at World Trade Center 7 on the 23rd floor.
As I arrived there, there were police all in the lobby. They showed me the way to the elevator. We got up to the 23rd floor, me and Mr. Hess, who I didn’t know was Mr. Hess at the time. We got to the 23rd floor. We couldn’t get in. We had to go back down. Then security and the police took us to the freight elevators where they took us back up and we did get in.
Upon arriving into the OEM EOC [Emergency Operations Center] we noticed that everybody was gone. I saw coffee that was on the desk. Still. The smoke was still coming off the coffee. I saw half eaten sandwiches. And only me and Mr. Hess were up there.
After I called several individuals, one individual told me to leave, and leave right away. Mr. Hess came running back in. He said, “we’re the only ones up here, we gotta get out of here.” He found the stairwell. So we subsequently went to the stairwell and were going down the stairs.
When we reached the 6th floor, the landing that we were standing on gave way. There was an explosion and the landing gave way. And I was left there, hanging. I had to climb back up. And now I had to walk back up to the 8th floor. After getting to the 8th floor, everything was dark. It was dark and it was very, very hot. Very hot.
I asked Mr. Hess to test the phones as I took a fire extinguisher and broke out the windows. Once I broke out the windows, I could see outside below me. I saw police cars on fire. Buses on fire. I looked one way, the building was there. I looked the other way, it was gone.
I was trapped in there for several hours. I was trapped in there when both buildings came down.
The firefighters came. They came to the window. And they . . . Because I was going to come out on the fire hose. I didn’t want to stay any longer. It was too hot. I was gonna come out on the fire hose. They came to the window and they started yelling, “Do not do that. It won’t hold you.” And then they ran away.
See, I didn’t know what was going on. That’s when the first tower fell. When they started running, the first tower was coming down. I had no way of knowing that.
Then I saw them come back. Now I saw them come back with more concern on their faces. And then they ran away again. The second tower fell. So as they turned and ran the second time, the guy said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be back for you.” And they did come back.
This time they came back with 10 firefighters. And they kept asking, “Where are you? We don’t know where you are?” I said, “I’m on the north side of the building.” Because when I was on the stairs, I saw “North Side”.
All this time, I’m hearing all types of explosions. All this time I’m hearing explosions. And I’m thinking that maybe it’s the buses around me that were on fire, the cars that were on fire. I don’t see no . . . you know? But I’m still hearing these explosions.
When they finally got to us and they took us down to what they called the lobby . . . Because I asked them when we got down there. I said, “Where are we?” He said, “This was the lobby.” And I said, “You gotta be kidding me.” It was total ruins. Total ruins. Now keep in mind: When I came in there, the lobby had nice escalators. It was a huge lobby. And for me to see what I saw was unbelievable.
And the firefighter that took us down kept saying, “Do not look down!” And I kept saying, “Why?” He said, “Do not look down.” And we were stepping over people. And you know you can feel when you’re stepping over people.
They took us out through a hole, that . . . I don’t know who made this hole in this wall. That’s how they got us out. They took us out through a hole through the wall to safety.
As they were taking me out, one firefighter had fallen. I believe he was having a heart attack. But before that, this big giant police officer came to me. And he said, “You have to run!” I said, “I can’t run my knees are swollen.” He said, “You’ll have to get on your knees and crawl, then!” He said, “Because we have reports of more explosions.” And that’s when I started crawling and I saw this guy fall behind me. His comrades came to his aid and they dragged him to safety.
I was looking for an ambulance for my knees, and at that time they told me we gotta walk 20 blocks to a refuge. Before I got there, EyeWitness News grabbed me and started interviewing me.
To those unfamiliar with the official story of WTC 7, this might seem like just another account of the terror, confusion and heroism that the victims of that day faced during their harrowing ordeal.
But this is not the case. Jennings’ story is in fact full of details that directly contradict NIST’s pronouncements on the destruction of the building.
Most notably, Jennings’ vivid description of the explosions that were taking place in the building during his ordeal is in direct contradiction to NIST’s assertion in its FAQ on WTC 7 that, although NIST “investigated the possibility” of explosions contributing to the building’s demolition, “NIST concluded that blast events inside the building did not occur and found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.”
In fact, not only is there ample evidence, available to anyone interested, that there were explosions going on in the building shortly before it went down.
But Jennings’ personal account confirms that there were numerous explosions taking place inside WTC 7 in the morning, hours before the building was destroyed.
The BBC in its “Conspiracy Files” program on “The Third Tower” tries to muddy the waters by implying that the explosions that Jennings testified to were in fact the dust and debris from the Twin Towers’ demolitions impacting Building 7.
JENNINGS: I received a phone call from one of my higher-ups and he said, “Where are you?” and I said, you know, “The emergency command center, of course. And then he came back, he said, “Get out of here get out of the area.”
NARRATOR: At 9:59 the 1300 foot South Tower collapses.
[…]
JENNINGS: I wanted to get out of that building in a hurry so I started—instead of taking one step at a time, I’m jumping landings. When I reach down to the sixth floor, with this eerie sound the whole building went dark and the staircase that I was standing on just gave way.
NARRATOR: At 10:28 the North Tower collapses in just 11 seconds.
With their editing and narrative intrusions, the BBC makes it seem that the explosions that Jennings and Hess experienced were just remanants of the Twin Towers hitting WTC 7. But in his interview with Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas, Jennings was completely adamant that he could still see both towers standing after the explosions happened.
JENNINGS: What happened was, when we made it back to the 8th floor—as I told you earlier, both buildings were still standing, because I looked. [Pointing] Two. [pauses] I look one way, look the other way—now there’s nothing there.
When I got to the 6th floor there was an explosion that forced us back to the 8th floor. Both buildings were still standing.
Keep in mind, I told you the fire department came..and ran. They came twice. Why? Because building tower 1 fell and then tower 2 fell. And then when they came back, they came back, they came back all concerned like to get me the hell out of there. And, and they did. And we got out of there.
I got into the building a little before nine . . . A little after nine. I didn’t get out of there until, like, 1:00 PM.
It is important to note that Jennings’ story does not present a different view of the official story of 9/11; it undermines that story entirely. Multiple explosions taking place in the lower floors of Building 7 before the Twin Towers’ destruction shows that NIST was wrong to dismiss the possibility of explosive demolition of WTC 7. Given that the explosions that trapped Jennings and Hess was not falling debris from the Twin Towers and was not a fuel oil tank explosion—a point stressed by Jennings and confirmed by NIST—then the most likely possibility—pre-planted explosives that were timed to go off during the attacks—remains not only uncontested, but unconsidered by NIST or any other investigative agency.
Indeed, the 9/11 Commission—which called Jennings in to question him about his story in one closed-door meeting that was never followed up—did not even mention the stunning, symmetrical, free fall demolition of World Trade Center Building 7 in its final report on the attacks. The BBC, as we have seen, attempted to bring Jennings’ story in line with the official story by purposely misleading its viewers about the timeline that Jennings himself insisted on. And NIST, infamously, took seven years to finally offer an account of Building 7’s collapse; an account so absurd as to be self-refuting:
Most remarkable of all, and conveniently left out of the account of every so-called “debunker” of Jennings’ testimony, is what Jennings himself felt about the destruction of Building 7.
JENNINGS: Well, I’m just confused about one thing and one thing only. Why WTC7 went down in the first place? I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard. I heard explosions.
The explanation that I got was that it was the fuel oil tank. I’m an old boiler guy. If it was a fuel oil tank, it would have been one side of the building. When I got to that lobby, the lobby was totally destroyed. It looked like King Kong had came through it and stepped on it. It was so destroyed, I didn’t know where I was. And it was so destroyed, they had to take me out through a hole in the wall. A makeshift hole that I believe the fire department made to get me out.
Given Barry Jennings’ personal experience, what did he make of the BBC’s attempts to alter the timeline of his story? How did he react to the official government viewpoint that no explosions took place in the building that day? What did he think of NIST’s refusal to even examine the evidence of controlled demolition of WTC 7 or their own computer-generated model of how “thermal expansion” and regular office fires brought down a 47-story steel-framed office tower?
Sadly, we will never know. When Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas released a small clip of their interview, Jennings’ job was threatened and he asked that the interview not be included in Loose Change Final Cut. The full interview was not released until after the BBC released their Third Tower documentary in which Jennings claimed to be unhappy with how his testimony was “portrayed” by Avery and Bermas.
No further interview or follow up with Jennings about his comments or about the way the BBC portrayed his story was possible. In September 2008, just as NIST was presenting its final report concluding that WTC 7 had spontaneously collapsed from ordinary office fires, it was reported that Barry Jennings had passed away in hospital the month before. No further details of his death were offered.
Dylan Avery, seeking to bring closure to Barry Jennings’ life, answer questions about his death, and honor the bravery of a 9/11 survivor who spoke the truth even when it was unpopular, hired a private investigator to determine the circumstances of Jennings’ death. In a remarkable and bizarre turn of events, however, after pursuing the case, the investigator referred the matter to the police, refunded his fee, and told Avery never to contact him again. To this day, no time or cause of death of Barry Jennings has ever been publicly announced or confirmed.
Despite the sad and confused ending of this tale, there is still hope. Hope that the courage Jennings had in standing up and telling the truth—even though it was not what the government, NIST, or the promoters of the official 9/11 story wanted to hear—will not be wasted. Hope that, ultimately, the historical record, and the truth itself, will out.
BERMAS: I think the strongest lesson to be learned about Barry Jennings is that the historical record is the historical record, no matter how hard you try to spin it. For instance, you know, now with these Dark Overlord documents leaking, there’s litigation talking about the transformers being blown up in the bottom of the building. OK, now if that had happened we would have had a visual event much like what happened with the Con Edison transformer blowing less than six months ago. It did not happen. And yet on paper and litigation and in official documents it does again and again. Well, it’s a cover-up.
The man stepped over bodies. We know that happened. He and Hess both talked about internal explosions. That building housed the CIA, the Secret Service, the SEC. I mean, I could go on. It’s unbelievable.
And I really hope with this latest litigation we finally get to the truth, no matter what. And I would hope that Barry would want the truth, no matter what he may have said in that BBC documentary. Because I spent time with the man. I was in his back seat, and he sure as hell wanted the truth then.
And so now, all these years later, those who are still seeking the truth are left in the same position as Barry Jennings himself was when he first talked to Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas: Looking at his own experience inside WTC 7 on 9/11 and the government’s official explanation of those experiences, and realizing that the two do not add up. Jennings and the other 9/11 whistleblowers are those special few who can stand up and say that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
JENNINGS: Well, I’m just confused about one thing and one thing only. Why WTC7 went down in the first place? I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard. I heard explosions.
Of the many scenes from September 11, 2001, that have been etched into the public consciousness, few are as iconic as the images of the survivors and first responders escaping Ground Zero completely covered in dust from the destruction of the Twin Towers.
And of the many, many lies told by government officials in the days following the attacks, few have been as blatant or as clearly documented as the lies about the safety of that dust propounded by the EPA and its administrator at the time, Chrstine Todd Whitman.
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: We know asbestos was in there, was in those buildings. Lead is in the those buildings. There are the VOC’s [Volatile Organic Compounds], however, the concentrations are such that they don’t pose a heath hazard.
WHITMAN: Well, if there’s any good news out of all this, it’s that everything we’ve tested for, which includes asbestos, lead, and VOCs have been below any level of concern for the general public health. Obviously, for those who are down here, these are very important…
WHITMAN: Statements that EPA officials made after 9/11 were based on the judgement of experienced environmental and health professionals at the EPA, OSHA and the CDC, who had analyzed the test data that 13 different organizations and agencies were collecting in Lower Manhattan.
I do not recall any EPA scientist or experts responsible for viewing this data ever advising me that the test data from Lower Manhattan showed that the air or water proposed long-term health risks for the general public.
As early as September 18th, the very same day that Whitman was assuring New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had already detected sulfur dioxide levels in the air so high that “according to one industrial hygienist, they were above the EPA’s standard for a classification of ‘hazardous’.” And even in those early days, first responders were already reporting a range of health problems, including coughing, wheezing, eye irritation and headaches. Even so, Whitman and the EPA persisted in perpetuating the lies about the dust, assuring New Yorkers that respirators were not needed outside of the “restricted area” around Ground Zero.
And, as we examined in 9/11 Suspects: Christine Todd Whitman, it was later confirmed that the White House had been editing the EPA’s press releases on the air quality in Manhattan and removing warnings about the air safety all along.
LISA MYERS: In the wake of 9/11, there were serious concerns about whether the air around ground zero was filled with toxins, unsafe for workers and residents. But by September 18th, many New Yorkers were back in their apartments and on the job, partly because of this press release that day from the Environmental Protection Agency, reassuring New Yorkers that their air is safe to breathe.
Was that press release misleading?
NIKKI TINSLEY: It was surely not telling all of the truth.
MYERS: In an exclusive interview, Inspector General Nikki Tinsley, the EPA’s top watchdog, tells NBC News the agency simply did not have sufficient data to justify such a reassurance. In fact, a new report by Tinsley’s office says at the time, more than 25 percent of dust samples collected before September 18th showed unsafe levels of asbestos. And the EPA had no test results at all on PCBs, dioxins or particulates in the air that can cause respiratory problems.
TINSLEY: The EPA did not give the people of New York complete information.
MYERS: So what happened? Tinsley’s report charges in the crucial days after 9/11 the White House changed EPA press releases to “add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” September 13th, the EPA draft release, never released to the public, says, EPA “testing terrorized sites for environmental hazards.” The White House changes that to EPA “reassures public about environmental hazards.” September 16th, the EPA draft says, “recent samples of dust on Water Street show higher levels of asbestos.” The White House version: “new samples confirm ambient air quality meets OSHA standards and is not a cause for public concern.” And the White House leaves out entirely this warning, that “air samples raise concerns for cleanup workers and office workers near Water Street.”
What many do not know, because their story has been largely ignored and marginalized, is that there were officials within the EPA who were desperately trying to blow the whistle on the agency’s lies. Officials like Cate Jenkins.
Dr. Cate Jenkins had joined the EPA in December 1979, serving as an Environmental Scientist with EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER). Her work included “detecting hazardous waste and developing regulations for their control,” a role that took on special importance in the wake of the toxic dust clouds covering Manhattan on 9/11. Unlike many of the other 9/11 whistleblowers, however, the events of September 11, 2001 did not represent the first time Dr. Jenkins had to blow the whistle on her own agency.
Jenkins dealt with many hazardous waste products in her job, but she specialized in Dioxin (a.k.a. Agent Orange), a contaminant of wood preservatives that was used in the Vietnam War as a defoliant. Monsanto Chemical Corporation was the largest producer of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and it was a series of Monsanto-sponsored studies in the early 1980s that led the EPA to conclude that “human evidence supporting an association” between dioxin and cancer “is considered inadequate.”
In February 1990, Jenkins wrote a memo to the EPA Science Advisory Board alleging that the Monsanto-sponsored studies were fraudulent, and that the studies, if performed correctly, would have shown the carcinogenic effects of dioxin. The memo caught the attention of the press and, under the glare of a media spotlight, the EPA launched a criminal investigation of Monsanto. That investigation was opened on August 20th and closed less than two years later, but, as EPA whistleblower William Sanjour notes, “the investigation itself and the basis for closing the investigation were fraudulent.” No attempt was even made to determine the scientific validity of the studies in question, and the EPA declined to pursue the matter because of statute of limitations technicalities.
The EPA did, however, find time to mount a campaign of retribution against Jenkins for having the audacity to blow the whistle on the agency and its listing practices for hazardous chemicals. Her work load was reduced and higher ups at the EPA immediately began talking about shunting her off into a purely administrative position where she would “not be involved with anything that puts her in direct contact with the regulated community or the public.” Her supervisor even wrote a letter to Monsanto apologizing for Jenkins’ memo questioning their studies.
Jenkins filed a complaint with the Department of Labor, and, in a series of cases that were appealed all the way up to the Secretary of Labor himself, it was found that she had been unfairly retaliated against for her whistleblowing and the EPA was ordered to reinstate her in her previous position.
But as nightmarish as that years-long, potentially career-ending ordeal in whistleblowing was for Dr. Jenkins, it was nothing compared to the ordeal she would have to face after “the day that changed everything.”
Beginning shortly after the attack, and continuing for years afterward, Dr. Jenkins attempted to bring the EPA’s faulty and fraudulent air quality testing practices to the attention of anyone who would listen. According to the Administrative Review Board of The US Department of Labor:
“Beginning in 2001, Jenkins made numerous disclosures and complaints alleging that the EPA engaged in improper laboratory testing, falsified a regulation governing exposure safety standards, and knowingly covered up the toxic properties of the dust emanating from the September 11, 2001 (“9/11”) World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. The improper testing and cover-up, Jenkins claimed, contributed to excessive and harmful toxic dust exposures of WTC “First Responders” and others sufficient to later cause respiratory and other serious and debilitating disease. Jenkins disseminated these disclosures and complaints to her supervisors and others at EPA, to the EPA Inspector General’s Office, members of Congress, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as to state officials, state elected representatives, law firms representing WTC First Responders, citizens, and the media. Her disclosures were posted on web sites and repeatedly quoted in the press and television broadcasts, and by members of Congress.”
One of these early memos, dated January 11, 2002, was written on EPA letterhead and addressed to “Affected Parties and Responsible Officials.” It examines the case of Libby, Montana—a designated “Superfund” site where the federal government is paying to help residents clean the “interiors of homes and residential soils [that] have been contaminated with asbestos from an adjacent vermiculite mining operation.” Jenkins compared the levels of contaminated dust particles found inside apartments in Lower Manhattan after 9/11 to dust samples taken in Libby, finding that the New York samples contained 22 times higher concentrations of asbestos than the Montana samples. As Jenkins noted: “The logical question thus arises: Why is EPA leaving people to their own devices in the cleanup of New York City, while intervening to clean homes at taxpayer expense in Libby?”
Worse, a team of independent scientists hired by tenant groups and New York political leaders found much higher samples of asbestos in the dust than what the EPA was reporting. As Dr. Jenkins told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the time: “For every asbestos fiber EPA detected, the new methods used by the outside experts found nine. [. . .] This is too important a difference to be ignored if you really care about the health of the public.”
CATE JENKINS: New York City directly lied about the test results for asbestos in the air. When they finally released them, they doctored the results. They changed high hazardous levels to zero when they finally released them.
After years of internal memos, press interviews and other tireless efforts to blow the whistle on the severe health issues that would develop as a result of the EPA’s deliberate cover up, the mainstream media was finally forced to begin covering the issue in 2006, after many of the Ground Zero clean up workers and the residents of Manhattan were beginning to succumb to the effects of the deadly dust.
In 2006, after a federal judge ruled that Whitman’s post-9/11 lies were “conscience-shocking” and that she would not be granted immunity for her actions, the media finally began to cover the story. The New York Times, CBS and other outlets all ran stories on the scandal, and they all quoted from Jenkins’ memos and featured interviews with Jenkins herself. After the 5th anniversary came and went on September 11, 2006, however, the media’s attention turned elsewhere and the story drifted out of the attention of the public once again.
But Dr. Jenkins’ attempt to obtain justice for the victims of this horrendous crime did not end there. In 2007, she penned a remarkable 134-page letter addressed to then-Senator Hillary Clinton, as well as Congressmen Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, calling for a Senate investigation of the falsification of pH corrosivity data for World Trade Center dust. The thoroughly documented letter, containing over 300 footnotes and citations, included a detailed analysis of the falsification of WTC pH data by groups like the US Geological Survey, and the remarkable story of how “In May 1980, EPA’s hazardous waste program falsified pH levels (changed the numbers) that the UN World Health Organization (WHO) International Labour Organization (ILO) determined would invariably result in corrosive permanent tissue damage (chemical burns).”
In a much shorter—though no less explosive—letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation written at the same time, Jenkins also called for the FBI to open a criminal investigation into the EPA’s cover up. This was followed up with an additional letter to the FBI in 2008 where Jenkins went even further, alleging fraud in pH testing of WTC dust and providing documentation that the EPA lab had diluted WTC dust almost 600 times with water before testing it for corrosivity.
Remarkably, despite her very public and very serious charges against the federal agency, and despite her past experience blowing the whistle on the EPA and subsequent years-long court battle to retain her position, Jenkins told Occupational Hazards magazine in 2002 that she did not fear losing her job over her comments. “All [EPA] management has to do is say, ‘Stop,’ and they haven’t,” she said, adding that as an EPA official, speaking out about lapses in the agency’s WTC effort does not require courage, just plenty of hard work.
Despite this belief, Dr. Jenkins was indeed fired from the EPA on December 30, 2010.
The firing followed a series of inane workplace incidents that resulted in suspensions and other retaliatory measures against Jenkins. The chain of events included Jenkins sending an email under the title “Op-Ed: Should EPA Institute a Workplace Fragrance Ban as Part of its Endocrine Disruptor Initiative?” after an encounter with a heavily-perfumed IT tech triggered an asthma attack in Jenkins, and her supervisor recommending that she be suspended, as the email—which was only sent to other EPA staff—”could have misled recipients as to whether it was an official EPA communication.” Eventually, the supervisor claimed that the series of incidents culminated with Jenkins threatening him in a workplace incident that was witnessed by no one.
As the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who supported Jenkins in her ordeal with the agency, summarized:
“Dr. Cate Jenkins, a senior chemist with more than three decades of agency tenure, publicly charged that due to falsified EPA standards, First Responders waded into dust so corrosive that it caused chemical burns deep within their respiratory systems. After raising the issue to the EPA Inspector General, Congress and the FBI, Dr. Jenkins was isolated, harassed and ultimately removed from her position on December 30, 2010 by EPA, based upon an un-witnessed and contested claim that the soft-spoken, petite childhood polio survivor threatened her 6-foot male supervisor.”
Continuing through a series of appeals, legal wrangling and bureaucratic red tape, Jenkins succeeded in having her employment reinstated in 2012.
AMY GOODMAN: A government whistleblower who was fired after exposing the dangers of asbestos and dust on workers at Ground Zero in the days after 9/11 has been reinstated to her job following a federal court decision. Cate Jenkins, a chemist who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, was the first EPA official to warn that dust in the air around the World Trade Center could pose a serious health risk. But the head of the EPA at the time claimed there was no reason for concern. Jenkins accused the EPA of intentionally hiding the dangers of air pollution at Ground Zero. She was fired in 2010. A federal court has now ruled Jenkins must be reinstated and given back pay.
Incredibly, even this was not the end of Jenkins’ ordeal.
Instead of returning her to her daily work duties in 2012 as ordered, the EPA instead kept Jenkins on paid administrative leave and then re-filed the same charges against her in 2013. Less than a year after being ordered to give her her job back, the agency was instead trying to take it away again, saying that Jenkins had failed to prove that the EPA was retaliating for her whistleblowing.
The agency’s move was especially galling given that Jenkins had yet to be given a chance to prove her case. Part of the reason that the EPA had been ordered to restore Jenkins to her job was because the agency had been found to have destroyed records pertaining to her case and otherwise obstructed discovery. In fact, her case that the EPA had retaliated against her for her whistleblowing was still before the Department of Labor.
The entire legal ordeal proceeded for years, finally coming to an end in 2018—a full eight years after the agency’s first attempt to fire her—when the Department of Labor confirmed a 2015 decision that the EPA had “retaliated against [Jenkins] for her reports to Congress and the FBI, and to the public through the media, about her allegations of violation of environmental laws and regulations by the EPA in connection with the rescue and cleanup operations at the WTC, in violation of the whistleblower provisions of the Clean Air Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.”
After nearly two decades of research and whistleblowing and almost ten years of legal nightmare, Jenkins was finally vindicated. She had been unjustly fired for attempting to call attention to the agency’s wrongdoings, and she was restored to her position.
But although this victory is to be celebrated, it comes as slim comfort to those seeking justice for the victims of 9/11, not just those killed in the buildings that day, and not just the victims of the wars that have been waged in the name of September 11th, but the victims of the toxic dust that Cate Jenkins and others have been warning about since the events unfolded.
And meanwhile, those who pushed the deadly lies about the air quality have moved on with their lives, continuing their careers and only occasionally being confronted by the independent media that is still attempting to shed light on the story.
DERRICK BROZE: Ms. Whitman, I appreciate your talk in there. You guys mentioned voting and the power of shaming voters. I feel like there’s probably a lot of folks who feel like you might need to be shamed since it’s been 17 years since 9/11 and nearly 10,000 people are now sick with 9/11 related illnesses. And I know you apologized about it two years ago and you were cleared in the courts, but all evidence points to your time in the Bush administration clearly led to people being sick and led to people getting cancer.
WHITMAN: Everything that I said was based on the best available science at the time. Science has progressed now. I think we found things that we didn’t know then. But I never said anything that wasn’t predicated on what the scientists told me. That morning—every morning—I had a conference call with the scientists: “What is safe to say? What can I say? What shouldn’t I say?” And they kept repeating that they were seeing nothing in their studies that show that there was a long-term health consequence from the air in Manhattan in general and lower Manhattan in general.
They may not be the lies we think of when we think of the lies of 9/11—lies which led to the illegal invasion of Afghanistan and contributed to the illegal invasion of Iraq—but the EPA’s lies about the World Trade Center dust have killed many hundreds.
And, like a Cassandra cursed with the ability to foresee a grim future that she could not prevent, Cate Jenkins spent decades of her life warning of the consequences of those lies. And for her service, she faced years of persecution. Worst of all, her warnings were dismissed until they could no longer be denied.
And there are still those who claim that 9/11 does not have its whistleblowers.
WHITMAN: To say [that] because a draft press release changes that somehow that’s nefarious manipulation is . . . It’s mind-boggling that you leap to that conclusion.
“But someone would have talked” say the self-styled skeptics that believe the government’s official conspiracy theory of 9/11.” After all, every major conspiracy has its whistleblowers, doesn’t it?”
But there’s a problem with this logically fallacious non-argument. “Someone” did talk. In fact, numerous people have come out to blow the whistle on the events of September 11, 2001, and the cover up that surrounds those events.
In 2001, Kevin Ryan was the site manager at Environmental Health Laboratories (EHL) in South Bend, Indiana. At the time, EHL was a subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a global safety consulting and certification corporation that tests a range of consumer and industrial products for compliance with government safety standards. Among many other things, UL provides fire resistance ratings for structural steel components to insure compliance with New York City building codes.
Just weeks after the events of September 11, 2001, UL’s then-CEO, Loring Knoblauch, visited Ryan’s EHL lab in South Bend. During his speech there, Knoblauch assured the lab’s workers that UL “had certified the steel in the World Trade Center buildings” and “that we should all be proud that the buildings had stood for so long under such intense conditions.” Knowing UL’s role in producing a fire resistance directory and providing ratings for steel components, Ryan thought little of the statement at the time.
But Ryan’s curiosity about UL’s role in the certification of the World Trade Center steel was piqued when, in 2003, he began to question the lies that the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and, eventually, to question the official story of September 11th itself. Recalling Knoblauch’s comments about UL’s role in certifying the Trade Center steel shortly after 9/11, Ryan began to take a professional interest in the official investigation into the Twin Towers’ destruction, an investigation in which UL itself was to play a part.
As Ryan began to learn more about the issues involved with the destruction of the towers and the ongoing investigation into that destruction, his concerns only grew. Why had the actual steel evidence of the towers’s destruction been illegally removed and disposed ofbefore a proper investigation could take place? Why did not one or two, but three modern, steel-frame buildings completely collapse due to fire on 9/11 given that such an event had never taken place before? Why did the towers fail at all when John Skilling, the structural engineer responsible for designing the towers, claimed in 1993—just five years before his death—that his own analysis of jet plane crashes and ensuing fires in the towers had concluded that “the building structure would still be there”? And why had Knoblauch himself bragged about UL’s role in testing the trade center steel—a test that would have rated the floor components for two hours of fire resistance and the building columns for three hours—when the North Tower “failed” in 102 minutes and the South Tower came down in just 56 minutes?
These concerns prompted Ryan, in October 2003, to write directly to Loring Knoblauch, outlining his thoughts and “asking what [Knoblauch] was doing to protect our reputation.” But if Ryan was expecting Knoblauch to put his mind at ease about these issues, he was sorely disappointed. Instead, Knoblauch—who included Tom Chapin, then the head of UL’s fire resistance division, in the email chain—wrote a response that only raised more questions than it answered.
KEVIN RYAN: Knoblauch copied Tom Chapin on his response to me, because it was Tom’s job as the leader of the fire resistance division to really address these kinds of things. And interestingly, Tom Chapin had written a letter to the editors at The New York Times in 2002 where he basically admitted, again, that UL’s testing had been behind the fire resistance of the World Trade Center towers. And so I’ve written about that a little bit, but he was very clear that the World Trade Center stood for as long as it did because of UL’s testing. And the problem of course with that is that that the south tower lasted for only 56 minutes after it was hit, and the testing that was required by New York City code was three hours of fire resistance for the columns and two hours for the floor assemblies. So 56 minutes and those ratings do not add up. That’s just not something that should go unquestioned.
So Loring Knoblauch wrote back to me after my questions in—it must have been October 2003 when I wrote to him. He wrote back to me a month later and he said all these things about how the company had tested the steel components used to build the World Trade Center towers. What he meant is he we had tested samples of those and provided ratings for fire resistance to the New York City Code—again, three hours for columns and two hours for floor assemblies. And that information established the confidence that the buildings would stand in those fire durations. And the test that was used was ASTM E119, which is the standard test used for this purpose. And UL is the leader in doing that testing, so it wasn’t a surprise.
And not only that but NIST—the government agency NIST [the National Institute of Standards and Technology]—had made clear in some of their progress reports that UL had consulted with the construction companies for the World Trade Center towers, and throughout the building of the buildings that UL had provided that information. So it’s really not a surprise at all.
And Tom Chapin replied further to me that the NIST agency was doing an investigation and asked me, basically, to have patience. And I did for maybe the next year.
In 2002, NIST began its three-year, $16 million study of the Twin Towers’ “failure.” Tom Chapin had assured Ryan that UL was cooperating with this investigation, and that his concerns would be allayed once the final report was released. But by 2004, it was already clear that there were serious problems with that report and its preliminary findings, including findings from tests conducted by UL on mock-ups of the WTC floor assemblies that contradicted NIST’s own conclusions about the buildings’ destruction.
RYAN: Well, it’s very important to understand that with the official accounts for the World Trade Center, there were a number of explanations given in the early years. And for the towers the one that was settled upon and that lasted for three years was the pancake theory.
And the pancake theory was this concept where the floor assemblies had heated up and sagged and this steel had softened or weakened and then they started to collapse upon each other in a pancake fashion. And then the the columns basically just folded inward. So that was the official account, really. It was given by the FEMA investigators Corley and Thornton and others—who coincidentally had also given us the official account for the Oklahoma City bombing. But in this video from the television program Nova it was captured for everyone’s benefit in little videos . . . animations. And so the pancake theory was the official account.
And UL tested the floor assemblies basically for the possibility of this in August 2004. So this was, again, nine months or ten months after I had asked my original questions. And they did so by using different assemblies with varying amounts of fireproofing. One of the assemblies had basically no fire proofing on it at all and they ran it through this furnace in this ASTM E119 test and concluded in the end that there would be no collapse. That the floors would not collapse even at temperatures and times greater than what we’re seeing at the World Trade Center.
And they made that clear. NIST made this clear, that the pancake theory was not supported. So that left us all at that time with no explanation, in 2004, three years later. Having invaded Iraq, having done so much to invest in the official account that the World Trade Center had been destroyed by these planes. And that was a difficult situation for NIST and for everyone.
Realizing that UL was not pressing NIST on the discrepancies in its findings, Kevin Ryan took matters into his own hands and, on November 11, 2004, wrote directly to Frank Gayle, the director of NIST’s Twin Towers investigation. That email began:
“As I’m sure you know, the company I work for certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings. In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year, I learned that they did not agree on the essential aspects of the story, except for one thing—that the samples we certified met all requirements. They suggested we all be patient and understand that UL was working with your team, and that tests would continue through this year. I’m aware of UL’s attempts to help, including performing tests on models of the floor assemblies. But the results of these tests appear to indicate that the buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.”
After pointing out the problems raised by NIST’s own investigation—including the tests that disproved claims that the steel in the floor area simply “melted”—Ryan got to the heart of the matter:
“This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this steel did fail at temperatures around 250C suggests that the majority of deaths on 9/11 were due to a safety-related failure. That suggestion should be of great concern to my company.
“There is no question that the events of 9/11 are the emotional driving force behind the War on Terror. And the issue of the WTC collapse is at the crux of the story of 9/11. My feeling is that your metallurgical tests are at the crux of the crux of the crux. Either you can make sense of what really happened to those buildings, and communicate this quickly, or we all face the same destruction and despair that come from global decisions based on disinformation and ‘chatter.’”
Predictably, if unfortunately, Gayle never responded to the email. However, Ryan made the important decision to share the email, and his concerns, with the broader public:
RYAN: Frank did not respond, no. Actually, that letter was sent to him and then also copied to a couple of people who were trying to find more information. Trying to find the truth about what happened on 9/11. Those two included David Griffin, who had just recently written a book, and Catherine Austin Fitz, the director of 911Truth.org.
Dr. Griffin asked me almost immediately if he could share it publicly. And, of course, with some hesitation, but knowing the importance in believing what I wrote, I told him it was OK. And overnight there must have been tens of thousands of people reading this letter on the web and people calling our offices in South Bend at UL constantly, and calling me at home constantly. I think a lot of people were feeling the same—they were thinking the same thing: That clearly there was something wrong here and the story was not explaining what we needed to know.
So Dr. Gayle did not respond. He’s never responded. Maybe one day I will talk to him personally and find out what he thinks. But, you know, these things are clear in terms of job—this is not really just a career decision, although it is. It’s a career decision. It’s more than that, it’s a decision about, you know, what kind of world we want to live in, and at a time where that kind of decision is really important. Because, you know, the book Nineteen Eighty-Four was supposed to be a fiction and it’s evolving into reality.
Ryan did not engage in these actions naively. He knew that allowing his concerns to go public would focus public attention on himself and on UL, and that such actions would have ramifications for his employment.
But if he was bracing himself for those ramifications, he didn’t have long to wait. His email to Frank Gayle was sent on Thursday, November 11, 2004. It was published on the web the following day. Immediately, Ryan’s phone was ringing off the hook and UL was being contacted for comment. That weekend, the company reached out to him to let him know the consequences of his actions.
RYAN: The Human Resources folks called me that weekend and asked if I would contact the people on the web who had published it and asked that it be taken down. And I refused to do that and told them that I didn’t think that was the right thing to do. And I think it was at that very point then they started making the plans to terminate me.
So I had actually taken the next Monday off of work and that was convenient. It allowed me to get my thoughts together. And then on Tuesday when I came in—which I believe was the 16th—the leaders from the Northbrook, Chicago office were there, and they had told me they would be: “Please make sure you’re there.” They brought a letter on UL letterhead and made it clear that, you know, they felt that I had practiced poor judgment in writing this letter and sending it to their client NIST. It had harmed their relationship with NIST, and thereby I was terminated.
So, yeah, that was a tough spot for my family and I. But my wife has been supportive. She knows the idealistic nature of her husband, I think, and she knew why it was important. And we’ve done fine, we’ve gotten by and gotten other jobs. And that’s—I believe people should recognize that it’s not the end of the world to lose your job. Sometimes it’s a new beginning that was useful.
Not for courting controversy, but merely for pointing out the glaring truth, Ryan was fired from his job. Like so many other whistleblowers in so many other stories, Ryan paid a price for doing what his conscience demanded.
Also like many other brave men and women who have been thrust into the position of blowing the whistle, Ryan has found a way to thrive despite the setbacks. Rather than keeping quiet and moving on with his life, Ryan has doubled down on his efforts, founding several action groups, editing the Journal of 9/11 Studies, writing articles and books on the subject of 9/11, volunteering on the board of directors of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, delivering lectures on the destruction of the World Trade Center, and continuing to raise public awareness of the problems with the official story of the founding event of the “War on Terror.”
In the end, despite the high price he paid career-wise, Ryan feels that his decision to blow the whistle and call out the self-contradictions of the NIST investigation was worth it. After all, it is only when those who know the truth are unafraid to step up and speak it, regardless of the personal consequences, that we will ever hope to achieve true justice.
RYAN: What I’ve been able to benefit from is understanding a lot more about society, history, politics, being better at communicating myself. And I’ve met a lot of great people. We’ve worked together to raise awareness and try to bring justice for 9/11. You know, I’ve met and presented with 9/11 victims’ family members. I’ve met 9/11 Commission leaders and and other people who were very central to this story. So many great researchers. So many great people. So overall it was definitely worth it for me.
It’s a personal decision, of course, and it has to be motivated by trying to do some good. If it’s not motivated by trying to do some good then you’re doing the wrong thing.
So when is the news not the news? When it’s simply ignored by the mockingbird media, of course. Join James for today’s exploration of yet another tool in the propagandists’ toolbox in this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch.
A research team at the University of Alaska’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao, Department of Civil Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, released yesterday for public comment their findings from a four-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001. This is the first scientific investigation of the collapse of the building. Here is the conclusion:
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
Notice three things: (1) it has taken 18 years to get a real investigation of the destruction of a building blamed on Muslim terrorists, (2) the only way “near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” can occur is through controlled demolition, and (3) this remarkable finding is not reported in the presstitute media.
In other words, the study is assigned to the Memory Hole.This is the way The Matrix operates. This is why you need this website. The only purpose of print and TV news is to program you so that you insouciantly go along with the agendas of those who rule you.Those who sit in front of TV news, listen to NPR, or read newspapers are programmed to be mindless automatons.
Note this resolution of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District
Whereas, on September 11, 2001, while operating at the World Trade Center in New York City, firefighter Thomas J. Hetzel, badge #290 of Hook and Ladder Company #1, Franklin Square and Munson Fire Department of New York, was killed in performance of his duties, along with 2,976 other emergency responders and civilians;
Whereas, members of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire Department were called upon to assist in the subsequent rescue and recovery operations and cleanup of the World Trade Center site, afflicting many of them with life-threatening illnesses as a result of breathing the deadly toxins present at the site;
Whereas, the Board of Fire Commissioners of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District recognizes the significant and compelling nature of the petition before the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York reporting un-prosecuted federal crimes at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and calling upon the United States Attorney to present that petition to a Special Grand Jury pursuant to the United States Constitution and 18 U.S.C. SS 3332(A);
Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries—not just airplanes and the ensuing fires—caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;
Whereas, the victims of 9/11, their families, the people of New York City, and our nation deserve that every crime related to the attacks of September 11, 2001, be investigated to the fullest and that every person who was responsible face justice;
NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Board of Fire Commissioners of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District fully supports a comprehensive federal grand jury investigation and prosecution of every crime related to the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as any and all efforts by other government entities to investigate and uncover the full truth surrounding the events of that horrible day.
“It made no difference which Palestinians we killed… They either were terrorists or would become terrorists or they gave birth to terrorists.” – former IDF commander, Rafael “ Raful” Eitan.
Spies,Femme fatale, deadly plots, killings, bombs, knives, guns, and an array of unique murderous weaponry that would make James Bond and “Q” envious. All this, combined with dozens of unapologetic and brutal cloak and dagger assassinations in foreign locales worldwide? Sounds like the makings of a great spy thriller.
Indeed. But, despite decades of Israeli denial… this story is true.
Ronen Bergman’s book, “Rise and Kill First,” was released in late 2018 to what, considering the inflammatory subject, was relatively little fanfare. While this might seem surprising, on reading this important chronological documentary of the inception and development of Israel’s worldwide assassination program it becomes clear that this book does provide a unique, very detailed and accurate history of Israel’s hundreds of extrajudicial killings over the past fifty plus years.
However, when read with just the right eyes, other far more important and separate timelines of history appear within the book to the reader already wary of the definition and rise of modern Zionism. Of these other unmentioned chronologies within the 530 pages, the author fails miserably in connecting these dots of his own excellent, but thus too superficial, presentation of fact.
What this book does more importantly reveal is a multi-faceted unmasking of Israel’s steady descent from the moral to the immoral tactics of war; the myth that it’s past Prime Ministers were not also barbaric terrorists and sacrosanct;the ongoing descent of other world leaders willing to give up their own conscience into the same mental abyss; the ever-increasing control of Israel over the minds of the American military, the CIA , its media and its politicians; and that Israel has never truly embraced peace as a foreign policy, preferring war and genocide instead.
Worse, “Rise and Kill First” reveals the true mind of the modern Israeli that has been infected by the rise of orthodox Jewish Likud party: An aberration of conscience that has no value for non-Jewish life worldwide whatsoever in its pursuit of its singular goal: Greater Israel.
***
“If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first!”– The Babylonian Talmud.
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” has been embraced in the routine alternative to turning the other cheek by Israel as foreign policy since its inception. This implies violent retaliation and retribution. But this book, when taken in totality, more accurately redefines this age-old Israeli mantra to its current Zionist definition, “Rise-up and kill first!”
The author’s failures in connecting the dots of his own excellently researched chronology are what makes this book a must-read. For observers of Israeli / Zionist hegemony of territory- and of mind- what Ronen omits are the many other chronologies that well illustrate, by his own documentation, why Israeli Zionism is indeed a threat that must be vanquished. These connections are obvious, yet omitted.
We need not wonder why.
In documenting Israel’s unknown – and always denied- program of targeted killings, Ronen’s work appears exceptional. What he presents is the result of seven years of his ongoing interviews of the scores of military and later political players who were the controllers of this seventy-five-year history of Israeli military development of domination and increased hegemony by assassination. The chronology begins with the killing of Tom Wilkin as far back as 1944because of his role in very effectively infiltrating and disrupting the Jewish underground in Palestine as it forced the way for eventual Israel. At that time long ago before Zionism prevailed in establishing for the first time a Jewish nation, the assassination was not yet a sanctified national military program. That would change.
While the reader must take the details as presented since independent corroboration from these witnesses is nigh on impossible, the book is extensively footnoted and on very few occasions does Ronen fail to directly identify the names of his sources which he professionally cross-references against each other for validity. The credibility of the facts he presents seems evident.
His prima facie chronology of a book is a rollicking ride. Ronen is a good storyteller and he takes the reader through the details of the book from killing after killing and the planning and execution of each orchestrated plot. Loaded with salacious details aplenty, the author uses dozens of case studies from past Israeli hits to show the ongoing development and inception of the many new Israeli military and intelligence services, ongoing improvement in the tactics of the kill and the year-by-year increase in the willingness of Israel and its leaders to kill beyond their own borders while ever descending from the existing human conscience. His subject well in hand, Ronen treats the reader to a real page-turner of a spy novel.
The book picks up the modern era of Zionist expansion and assassination as WWII draws to a close with the Nuremberg trials and the flight of Nazi war criminals to other countries. Retribution is the key to these many stories as Israeli operatives systematically track down and arrest or kill those they accuse, such as Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As is the case with most books from Israeli authors on the subject of Israel, Ronen falls too conveniently upon the hyperbole of the Holocaust as reason for this initial killing and rendition program, but without proper examination. These killings first occur during the inception of the post-war development of Israel, the fact of which Ronen is far too brief and equally serving of the Israeli narratives since the historical slaughter and expropriation of Palestinians is glossed over.
As the author proceeds with his chronology, the reader is treated to a very fine and detailed description of many such major world events like the Munich Olympics kidnappings of 1972, the raid on Entebbe, Uganda and many, many more. Ronen does a very good job of cross-referencing the details of these many events with a plethora of interviews and quotes from the operatives directly involved at the time. What he reveals each time is quite likely the best examination of these events so far provided in print. Regarding Munich, he delves in great detail into the full rescue effort that includes the involvement of the German government which was at loggerheads with the Israelis and the IDF in the attempted and failed rescue.
Ronen’s effectiveness and credibility are challenged, however, by his almost constant insistence – by reference- that the Israeli actions he presents are invariably only retaliatory for a specific act of aggression by pro-Palestinian factions against Israelis. Ronen too routinely demonizes the Palestinian and Arab players’ actions and uses them too often as a fait a compli for their own eventual demise while rarely looking at the Israeli atrocity that preceded a Palestinian attack which led to yet another Israeli targeted killing.
During this period of the book, Ronen does a very good job documenting the change in the policy of the Israeli assassinations from executions only within Palestinian territories to the eventual decision to perform these assassinations globally.Ronen, although predominantly showing successful operations, does not shy away from Israel’s many failures as well.
He presents as almost comical the Manchurian Candidate-like attempt to brainwash, month after month, a Palestinian prisoner code-named “Fatkhi,”who is deemed to be mentally susceptible to these techniques and who, it was intended, would next be sent back to Palestine to assassinate PLO president Yasser Arafat. The results of this humorous vignette, after month’s of careful mental revision of the test subject assassin, are that the prisoner is finally freed on Dec. 19, 1969, by allowing him to cross the Jordanriver. Due to equally poor planning, is swept down river and left clinging to a mid-river rock. When finally making it to shore Fatkhi immediately runs to the PLO police headquarters and then informs Arafat of all that he had endured at Israeli hands during his nine months of obviously unsuccessful programming.
When it comes to Arafat, the book shows the absolute hatred of Israel towards him personally due to his effectiveness as PLO chairman, a hatred that grows almost maniacally in the hearts of every Prime Minister and IDF commander as Arafat, again and again, evades their seemingly well planned and very numerous attempts to bump him off. This hatred is only made worse by the rising worldwide respect for Arafat and the PLO cause after each failed attempt.
It is at this stage in the book that, beyond the demand for Arafat’s blood, Israel crosses the mental Rubicon from respect for human life- other than the target- to allowing for and condoning the innocent to also be killed as a matter of convenience to each plot. The assassinations of a foreign scientist involved in the burgeoning nuclear programs in Iraq, Iran and Egypt began this slope downward.
Although Ronen fails to bring this point to the reader’s attention, he unwittingly documents in exceptional detail this change in conscience and therefore terror tactics which he best illustrates in the example of the Ashkelon murders.
***
“I do not remember an event of similar gravity in the history of the state of Israel” – Yehudit Karp, Israeli Deputy Attorney General for special duties
In understanding the change of the Israeli military and political mind towards that of proactive and routine utilization of terror by assassination, the Ashkelon affair is a seminal point in the book. This connection should not have been overlooked by Ronen; for what this case actually meant to subsequent Israeli war tactics was a complete change in morals of its leaders and that this change would devolve within leaders in other countries as well, particularly America.
On April 12, 1984, four Palestinian youths, three of whom were teenagers- the other twenty years of age- hijacked a bus heading en route from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon with forty Israelis aboard. Taking the passengers hostage with one knife and a fake bomb made of an old suitcase with wires dangling out from its seams for effect, they intended to get the bus to Palestine and next negotiate the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
When IDF troops eventually disabled the bus a stand-off ensues and negotiations for surrender begin with optimism for a peaceful resolution since, as future PM, Ehud Barak, who was on scene at the time assessed, “the hijackers would [likely] agree to let the hostages go in exchange for a few sandwiches.” But at 4:43 AM Sayeret Matkal (one of the many Israeli military factions) soldiers open fire killing two of the hijackers immediately and an Israeli woman instead.
Apprehended, the two remaining Palestinians are taken by Shin Bet (Israeli Intelligence Service similar to the American CIA) operatives under direction of the infamous Avraham (Avrum) Shalom, the longtime head of Shin Bet who, as Ronen showcases during previous killings, is a man predisposed of secretly sanctioned powers to kill with impunity and without authorization. As Ronen quotes Yuval Diskin, an eventual Shin Bet chief, “ We feared him… He was a strong man, brutal, clever, very stubborn, uncompromising, a real ass kicker.”
And so, since Shalom was not in favor of live terrorists being tried in court, hours later after first ordering the two Palestinians moved away from witnesses to a dank Shin Bet interrogation basement cell, next he allows/orders the soldiers transporting them to stop by the roadside en route and bludgeon them to death with rocks and iron bars to make it look like Israeli settlers had performed a different vendetta.
Then Shalom relaxes, safe in the knowledge that his personal barbarity was sanctioned from the top all the way to then PM Yitzhak Shamir, who had formerly been in charge of the same killing unit when so many innocent foreign scientists were put to death-secretly- at his whim as well. This was confirmed by Carmi Gillon, head of Shin Bet in the ’90s who assessed, “… he [Shalom] felt as if he could do whatever he wanted to do.” Within this subject, Ronen exposes the secret killing program know as “Weights” that was created by Shalom. Assesses the author:
“They were officially sanctioned extrajudicial killings, proposed to the head of Shin Bet by his senior commanders, approved by him and then the Prime Minister, first Rabin and then Begin and Shamir.”
What next transpires is what Ronen very accurately refers to as a “coup.”This was Shalom’s government-sanctioned barbarity vs. existing military and civil law: Laws that at that time favoured a proper conscience of man in wartime and therefore respect for human life. When the dust would settle several years later, the rule of law and its strictures would no longer functionally exist. And the mind of the modern Zionist would instead be set free to roam the earth.
Shalom would have, as so many times before escaped scrutiny, except for fate, a very inconvenient camera and that three senior Shit Bet officers would not lower their own moral values in kind.
Israeli press photographer Alex Levac had taken pictures of the arrest of the two remaining live Palestinians and managed to stash the film before being searched by a Birds soldier (another IDF special ops sub-set) for doing so.
When Levac’s final few shots disproved the IDF narrative that all four Palestinians had been killed at the scene of the bus incident, his editor’s at Hadashot tried to go with the story but were hit by IDF censors. However, someone leaked the story to Stern and the NYT along with the photo. When the story blew up, then PM Shamir and Shalom did all they could to stop the subsequent formal inquiry in its tracks.
In preparation for this coup, ten of Shalom’s men and co-conspirators meet in a distant orange grove under the direction of Gen. Yossi Ginosser, to ironically avoid Shin Bet listening devices and surveillance. Here they effect their plan which includes taking down their comrade, Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, a man of impeccable reputation-and a personal friend of Ginnoser- who had commanded the troops at the scene of the bus- as the patsy.
When next Ginosser, with the full knowledge of Shalom, weaves a web of deceit designed to thwart the inquiry, they also seek to shift their crime to Mordechai by testifying that, due to their observations that day it was Mordechai who had given the order to kill the Palestinians. The court conveniently certifies their plot by clearing Shalom and company and next Mordechai is charged with manslaughter in their stead.
But fate then smiles on Mordechai when a military advocate, Menahem Finkelstein, who was on the first inquiry panel subsequently is involved in the decision on whether Mordechai is to be indicted for manslaughter, notices many inconsistencies in testimony and facts. Despite this, Shin Bet and the Justice Ministry insist – for obvious reasons – that Mordechai be prosecuted. Thanks to Finkelstein, however, Mordechai is, after being indicted, finally acquitted.
If this had been the end of the story it would have been relatively insignificant. But, during this lengthy saga three senior Shit Bet officials including Reuven Hazak, (Ronen does not name the other two) who was already tapped as Shalom’s successor to head the IDF, were having trouble sleeping. They concluded that justice would only be served by the collective resignations of all the conspirators including Shalom.
Shalom refuses and Hazak next goes directly to then PM Shimon Peres, who had replaced Shamir a year before. What Hazak does not know is that Shalom had already launched a preemptive strike of his own with Perez, who, after placating Hazak, next allows Shalom to sack all three whistleblowers. As the author notes:
“They departed in disgrace from the service they had given their lives to, estranged from their colleagues, who were given to believe that they were traitors.”
However, the three are undaunted, collectively showing up unannounced in the dead of night to the office of Israel’s Attorney General, Yitzhak Zamir, whom himself has previously signed off on many an Israeli hit. After spilling their guts for many hours about the true story of the Palestinians of Ashkelon and the frame-up of Mordechai, Deputy attorney general Yehudit Karp years later recalled to Ronen:
“I felt as if the sky had fallen. It is not possible to exaggerate what happened there. It was a gross undermining of the rule of law and corruption of all the systems. I do not remember an event of similar gravity in the history of the State of Israel.”
When Attorney General Zamir immediately calls for a new inquiry and Israel police launched a second concurrent investigation, Shalom refuses to yield. He and his other Shit Bet conspirators next begin direct intimidation of their own against Israel Judicial officials that was so extreme that Attorney General Zamir and others within the prosecution were assigned 24-hour police protection. From Shin Bet!
Shalom and company now appear to be cornered on all sides with the power of the full Justice Ministry now steaming directly at them. But Shalom has one last card to play. A trump card as it turned out.
Shalom, Ginosser and the others involved produce what Ginosser termed, The Skulls Dossier: A list of the secret and never revealed skeletons in the closet of not only the Shit Bet and Weights but, worse, of the former leaders who became Israeli Prime Ministers themselves afterwards. Ronen sums up:
“In reality, it was pure blackmail, an implicit threat that if Shalom and his allies were indicted, they would take others with them, including Prime Ministers.”
The denouement of this end to the power of the civilian Israel courts over the military came quickly in a final move by former PM Shamir (who had full knowledge of the plot), then current PM Shimon Peres (who had approved Shalom’s plot) and future PM Yitzhak Rabin who was at the time defense minister. They convince then Israeli president Chaim Herzog to hand down “all-encompassing pardons to the implicated Shit bet personnel, covering all proceedings against them. Eleven men were thus exonerated before they’d even been indicted.”
When challenged by the media about his own complicity in covering up the Ashkelon affair and covert operations Herzog was unabashed, stating, “That way [a trial] perhaps sixty to eighty affairs from the past would have emerged. Would that have been good for the country?”
As of this last day of the Ashkelon affair, Israeli respect for law, morality and the proper conscience of man would begin its steady descent towards the gates of hell where the souls of men like Shalom, Shamir, Begin and Netanyahu and their other Zionist ilk still seek mental refuge today.
***
“The attacks on 9/11 gave our own war international legitimacy. We were able to completely untie the ropes that had bound us.”– Shin Bet chief, Yuval Diskin.
While the aforementioned brief synopsis of the Ashkelon Affair does not do justice to Ronen’s much better and very detailed and footnoted portrayal, it is this parable that shows the inherent value of “Rise and Kill First” that is not garnered at the hands of the author. For, to theZiologist- those predisposed to understanding the post-1967 worldwide threat of Israeli inspired Zionism- this one parable should ring true as a much too close parallel to what we see in today’s Israel and it’s American vassal.
Few observers of current American foreign policy would argue against the premise that its operations are today controlled by the Zionist elements on the rise in Israel due to a directly proportional rise of the Jewish orthodox influenced Likud Party. What is also important to note is that the Ashkelon affair took place more than thirty-five years ago: Before America eventually followed this example in lock-step.
It would, thus, be easy to substitute the names Bolton, Pompeo or Abrams for that of Shalom, or that of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange or William Binney for the three Shin Bet officers who also took a moral stand that was brutally put down by a Zionist mentality revolted by inconvenient truth and the demands of correct conscience. It would also be easy to substitute the CIA for Shin Bet as the likely leaders of American extrajudicial killings currently sanctioned worldwide by an administration whose cajones are obviously in the fists of a Zionist controlled cadre transplanted into Langley, VA.
But should the reader of this review not yet see the value of this book as the narration of a chronology and history of the ongoing and increasing control over foreign and American governments alike, perhaps Ronen’s documentation of Israel’s “Red Pages” might help with one’s proper epiphany.
Red Pages are the death sentences for extrajudicial killings, once signed by Israeli Prime Ministers prior to the assassination of the victim. This began more than fifty years ago. Readers capable of objective historical understanding of the Obama administration should well know that it was during this time in American history that America followed the Israeli model and began the Tuesday Morning Briefings where, under America’s Nubian president in black-face, American foreign policy succumbed to CIA pressure and to the Zionist military business model wholesale and began allowing the extrajudicial killings of anyone offered up weekly for sacrifice by the CIA, including the innocent… and American citizens as well.
Within the book we follow these many Red Pages- named for the color of the document- as they morph from close civilian scrutiny within established law, to Israel changing the law for convenience in John Woo fashion under Bush II and eventually signing the equivalent Red Pages each week in secret in Washington and without concern whatsoever for Law or conscience. Or US judicial oversight.
The use of Red Pages by Israel began under Golda Meir who had already approved many assassinations and was predisposed to do the same to Black September leader Mahmoud Hamshari. Meir, however, was uncomfortable shouldering full responsibility and instead convened a panel of civilian leaders to formally approve the Red Page. At this time in history, the early ’70s, Israel had just begun assassinations outside of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, but was not willing to hurt the innocent in the crossfire. As Meir told Mike Harari, former Mossad boss, before approving the hit, which would see Hamshari taken out in France, “be sure not a hair falls from the head of a French citizen.”
But by 1977, Israel under PM Menachem Begin saw him merely signing off all Red Page requests without reservation or committee and upon request and “Begin signed off on operations face-to-face, without a stenographer and without his military aid.”
In 1983 Israel next began approving targeted killings of foreign diplomats. First to go down wasIranian ambassador to Syria,Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur. At this point, targeted killing was routinely justified to stop likely future terrorist acts or as the Israelis called it, “negative treatment.” Still, these had to be approved at the highest level, but this proved far too restrictive to developing Israeli tactics. The next step was to re-brand the killings as an “interception” which conveniently no longer required authorization from the PM. As Ronen quotes a Northern Command officer,
“ … a precedent was created by which an assassination operation was called something else… in order to enable a lower echelon to approve it. Killing a man no longer required the prime minister’s approval.”
A different precedent was also created at the same time: that of killing retroactively as well as proactively.
By the time the US began using drones for its own targeted killings Israel – the first to use drones for this purpose had been doing so for years with a precursor drone program of its own. Here the Red Page definition for approval was further lowered. Using the new term, “illegal combatant” the forerunner of Donald Rumsfeld infamous, “enemy combatant,” after protracted debate the Israeli judiciary sided with the military in broadening the right to kill the innocent. As Ronen points out after laying out the details:
“The term allowed [killing]anyone active in a terrorist organization; even if his activity was marginal… he could be considered as a combatant-even when asleep in his bed-unlike a soldier on leave who had taken off his uniform.”
The culmination of this step-by-step decline in the value for human life was best exemplified in Ronen’s description of the killing of Hamas political leader, Mahmoud al-Zahar. He was not considered to be an imminent threat and was, as described by Israeli General Giora Eiland ”an elderly, pitiable, half-blind cripple in a wheelchair.” Further advanced planning predicted that the operation to kill al-Zahar ” would have implications as far as hurting uninvolved persons…”
Ariel Sharon, who as detailed repeatedly in the book is the embodiment of the barbaric tactics within themodern Zionist soul, approves the killing in an operation titled, ” Picking Anemones.”
The result is that al- Zahar dies from a hell Fire missile fired through his apartment window and many men women and children in the building join him in the rubble of what is left of Israel’s former allusion of adherence to humanity.
As Ronen takes the reader through the decades, what becomes clear, besides Israel’s descent from conscience, is the effect this full chronology has had on the world, particularly America. A single footnote on page 702 reveals the tight editorial control that likely allowed for the publishing of his book only by deliberate omission of the obvious connections, but also unwelcome facts. Following an interview with General Giora Eiland who assessed correctly, “The American approach to targeted killings has changed from one end to the other,” he follows up by quoting former US Home Land Security boss Michael Chertoff, who adds, regarding American targeted killings worldwide, ”I think they are very much better than non-targeted killings.”
But the many connections missed by Ronen but showcased non-the-less in his book go beyond his detailed story of the ongoing military take over of Israel judiciary and political institutions and the ever-changing definitions of Red Pages and therefore the value of human life.
For the Ziologist interested in adding Ronen’s history to his memory texts, one will also find within a similar descent of other world leaders and the United Nations; the rise of the Likud party under the influence of Jewish orthodoxy as spearhead to these changes; the rolling over of the media against examining Israeli atrocities; the steady insertion of ” dual loyalty” Zionists into the intelligence services of America, Britain, France and Europe; and Israel’s eventual utter disregard for world opinion and outrage primarily because of its infection into the aforementioned facet of world society.
Although Ronen fails, again and again, to make these connections, his excellent research, interviews and cross-referencing within the scores of assassinations he documents make these connections, however, irrefutable. This leaves the Ziologist -or the casually concerned reader of Israeli modern history- to draw one encompassing conclusion: Israeli Zionism is the singular cancer that has been forcefully injected into the minds of world leaders across the globe; a cancer that these similarly affected leaders would wantonly force upon what little remains of the moral, civilized and correct conscience of man.
Ronen failed to make any of these many and all too obvious connections. If he had, the book would have been a bombshell.
His failures are also why the reader has not likely heard of his book, and… why it managed to be published at all.
Jason Bermas of Pulse Change joins us to discuss the recently released “9/11 papers.” What new information is in this release, and does it tell us anything of value about 9/11? Can the documents be verified?
“As Mr. Yakub continued to preach for converts, he told his people that he would make the others work for them. (This promise came to pass.) Naturally, there are always some people around who would like to have others do their work. Those are the ones who fell for Mr. Yakub’s teaching, 100 per cent.” — The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, chapter 55 of Message to the Blackman in America titled “The Making of Devil”
“Three blessings a Jewish man is obligated to pray daily: ‘(Blessed art Thou,) Who did not make me a gentile; Who did not make me a woman; and Who did not make me a slave.’” — Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b–44a
The story of the Jewish American experience that most Jews want to believe, and want the world to believe, is one of almost endless historical victimhood. They insist that they fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, landing safely on Ellis Island long after the Civil War’s end in 1865, and certainly some did. … continue
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Ronen Bergman’s book, “Rise and Kill First,” was released in late 2018 to what, considering the inflammatory subject, was relatively little fanfare. While this might seem surprising, on reading this important chronological documentary of the inception and development of Israel’s worldwide assassination program it becomes clear that this book does provide a unique, very detailed and accurate history of Israel’s hundreds of extrajudicial killings over the past fifty plus years.
Aletho News
Aletho News 