9/11 News Stories

Excerpts of Key 9/11 News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Shards of glass and dust from the World Trade Centre towers sit on Professor Steven Jones's desk at Brigham Young University in Utah. Evidence, he says, of the biggest cover-up in history - one too evil for most to believe, but one he has staked his academic career on exposing. Jones, a physics professor, is not alone. He is a member of 9/11 Scholars for Truth, a recently formed group of around 75 US professors determined to prove 9/11 was a hoax. In essays and journals, they are using their association with prominent universities to give a scholarly stamp to conspiracy theories long believed in parts of Europe and the Arab world, and gaining ground among Americans. It is impossible, says Jones, for the towers to have collapsed from the collision of two aeroplanes, as jet fuel doesn't burn at temperatures hot enough to melt steel beams. The horizontal puffs of smoke - squibs - emitted during the collapse of the towers are indicative of controlled implosions on lower floors. The scholars have collected eyewitness accounts of flashes and loud explosions immediately before the fall. What's more, the nearby World Trade Centre 7 also collapsed later that afternoon. The building had not been hit by a plane, only damaged by fire.

Nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who toiled in the dust and fumes at ground zero have had trouble breathing, and many will probably be sick for the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in releasing results of the biggest Sept. 11 health study yet. The Mount Sinai Medical Center study is conclusive proof of a link between recovery work at the World Trade Center ruins and long-term respiratory problems, doctors aid.

A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality. Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy videos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. Loose Change is a compelling experience. Take the section about the attack on the Pentagon. As the film points out...the crash site doesn't look right. There's not enough damage. The hole smashed in the Pentagon's outer wall was 75 ft. wide, but a Boeing 757 has a 124-ft. wingspan. Why wasn't the hole wider? There's something empowering about just exploring such questions. Loose Change appeals to the viewer's common sense: it tells you to forget the official explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and your brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen without any help or interference from the talking heads. Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and nonconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're thinking different.

According to a poll by Ohio University and Scripps Howard News Service, 36 percent of Americans believe that government officials "either assisted in the 9/ 11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks." Sixteen percent of Americans, the survey indicates, believe that "secret explosives"...brought down the World Trade Center towers. Robert Bowman, who directed the "Star Wars" defense program under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, reached his own conclusion after questioning...why the American military hadn't intercepted the hijacked planes before they hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center [and] why the Pentagon didn't release surveillance tapes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the military complex. A former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel with a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology...Bowman theorizes that Cheney and other officials stood to benefit financially. Bowman says they had a long-standing desire to control Iraq's oil and to use the country as a strategic hub for controlling the entire Middle East. The Sept. 11 commission, he says, neglected to investigate these possible connections, leaving a huge gap in the official account. Scholars for 9/11 Truth [is] an organization that believes the U.S. government "permitted 9/11 to occur." Among the group's members are Paul W. Rea, a humanities lecturer at St. Mary's College in Moraga; Tracy Belvins, a research scientist in bioengineering at Rice University; Kevin Barrett, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...and Stephen LeRoy, an economics professor at UC Santa Barbara who has been a visiting economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Already the world's largest producer of opium, Afghanistan's 2006 output has soared a staggering 59 percent, according to a survey by the U.N.'s drug control program. So this year, the country that the United States invaded five years ago to stabilize will produce 16,000 tons of opium. Drugs now make up more than half of gross domestic product. Top government officials are tied to the drug trade. Corruption runs rampant. Addiction rates in Afghanistan and neighboring Central Asia, Iran and Pakistan are skyrocketing.

Note: How is it possible that the opium production continues to skyrocket in Afghanistan, when it was decimated the year before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? For a possible answer, click here.

The Transportation Department's inspector general urged the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday to consider disciplinary action against two executives who failed to correct false information provided to the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The acting inspector general, Todd J. Zinser, whose office acts as the department's internal watchdog, found in a new report that the F.A.A. executives...learned after the fact that false information was given to the commission in May 2003 about the F.A.A.'s contacts with the Air Force on the morning of Sept. 11. The inspector general's report, prepared in response to complaints from the independent Sept. 11 commission, found that the three F.A.A. executives failed to act on an "obligation" to correct the false information provided to the commission, which found widespread confusion within the aviation agency and the military on the morning of the attacks. The F.A.A., part of the Transportation Department, declined to identify the three executives, whose names and titles were not revealed in the inspector general's report. Nor did the agency say whether it would consider disciplinary action. Richard Ben Veniste, a commission member, said in an interview on Friday that he was troubled that it had taken the inspector general two years to complete his investigation -- more time than it took the 9/11 commission to complete all of its work -- and that he released the report "on the Friday afternoon before the Labor Day weekend."

Faced with an angry minority of people who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were part of a shadowy and sprawling plot run by Americans, separate reports were published this week by the State Department and a federal science agency insisting that the catastrophes were caused by hijackers who used commercial airliners as weapons. The official narrative of the attacks has been attacked as little more than a cover story by an assortment of radio hosts, academics, amateur filmmakers and others. As a motive, they suggest that the Bush administration wanted to use the attacks to justify military action in the Middle East. A nationwide poll taken earlier this summer...found that more than a third of those surveyed said the federal government either took part in the attacks or allowed them to happen. And 16 percent said the destruction of the trade center was aided by explosives hidden in the buildings. Details are available at http://newspolls.org. The State Department report...is titled, "The Top Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theories" and says, "Numerous unfounded conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet." Produced by an arm of the State Department known as a "counter-misinformation team," the report is dated Aug. 28...at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html. Among those now propelling the argument that explosives took down the trade center is Steven E. Jones, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, coeditor with Mr. Ryan of www.journalof911studies.com, which published his paper, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse on 9-11-2001?"

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has tumbled into a new dispute over the Sept. 11 attacks of five years ago. Its Presbyterian Publishing Corp. has issued "Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11" (Westminster John Knox), containing perhaps the most incendiary accusations leveled by a writer for a mainline Protestant book house. Author David Ray Griffin tells of concluding that "the Bush-Cheney administration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this (American) empire under the pretext of the so-called war on terror." Griffin has solid mainline credentials. He's an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and recently retired after a long teaching career at the United Methodists' Claremont (Calif.) School of Theology. Such a massive cover-up is possible, he explains, because people don't want to believe high officials would "launch an attack on their own citizens." Griffin also asserts claims about "abundant evidence" of Bush administration orchestration of 9/11 in a separate anthology from Westminster and also did so in two previous books for a small secular publisher. He also has spoken to campus and church groups. He's a member of "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" along with Kevin Barrett, a Muslim instructor at the University of Wisconsin who is under fire for making similar accusations. The publisher's publicity contends that Griffin "applies Jesus' teachings to the current political administration" and puts forth "an abundance of evidence and disturbing questions that implicate the Bush administration."

Note: The article also tries to tear down Prof. Griffin. It is interesting to note that none of the top U.S. papers picked up this important Associated Press article.

A Russian investigator has said grenades fired by surrounding Russian forces could have triggered the Beslan school bloodbath in September 2004. Yuri Savelyev's conclusions contradict the official view that bombs planted by the hostage-takers in the school gym went off just before the gun battle. Mr Savelyev is a member of the Russian parliamentary commission investigating the siege, in which 331 people died. Mr Savelyev, a weapons and explosives expert, said that during the investigation, he "discovered that the consequences of those blasts could not at all be explained by the explosions of the home-made devices installed by the rebels". The head of the commission, Stanislav Kesayev, said he had confidence in Mr Savelyev's conclusions. "He had more resources than our commission. He relied on his own knowledge as a weapons specialist and mathematician," Mr Kesayev told the radio. For weeks after the siege Russian officials had denied the use of flamethrowers.

Note: The Russian school bombing is very likely one of many examples of a false-flag operation -- a terrorist act staged secretly by a government and blamed on another group or government in order to achieve a certain agenda. To understand more about that agenda, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/brighterfuture. To see Terrorstorm, an excellent, free documentary on false flag operations, click here.

Solomon: I've put many of the questions that you raise in your book to Lee Hamilton, and he simply said that they were inundated. [They couldn't] possibly respond to every question. [David Ray] Griffin: I'm sure there's an element of truth in that. On the other hand, the questions that I summarized in my book were not idiosyncratic - these were the main questions that had been raised by many, many members of the 9/11 Truth movement. I'm afraid his answer is just an excuse for not dealing with any of these questions. They have constantly refused to enter into any public debate with any of the members of the 9/11 truth movement on these issues. We would like to have a genuine investigation...one that is not controlled by an insider to the Bush administration. The [9/11] Commission was really run by Philip Zelikow, the executive director. Zelikow determined what subjects would be investigated and what ones not. Zelikow would also have been in the position of determining what got deleted and what got included in the final report. Zelikow...was essentially was a member of the Bush administration. He and Condi Rice had served together in the administration of Papa Bush. They wrote a book together. Then when George W. Bush became President, and named Condi the National Security Adviser, she brought Zelikow on to help with the transition. Then he was appointed to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. I do not develop a theory as to what really happened, there are so many mysteries. But what I say we can be confident of is that the official story is false, and if the administration is the one putting out the official story, it should be the number one suspect for who actually orchestrated the attacks.

Note: For excellent information and free videos of Prof. Griffin: www.WantToKnow.info/050504davidraygriffin

What was already expected to be a controversial documentary that charges that Osama bin Laden's top spy infiltrated three different branches of U.S. national security has gotten even hotter. Veteran investigative reporter Peter Lance call[ed] the TV documentary based on his book a whitewash. The documentary, Triple Cross, is scheduled to air on the National Geographic Channel Aug. 28, with Lance's book of the same name set for publication a few weeks later. But their accounts of the way bin Laden's master spy Ali A. Mohamed outwitted the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. Army may be overshadowed by the acrimonious war of words. National Geographic's producers at one point held back transcripts of interviews they were supposed to share with Lance, and still won't let him see the final documentary unless he signs what they call a "non-disparagment agreement." Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to...detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant at the same time he was smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Department. His whereabouts remain shrouded in official secrecy. Lance, an Emmy winner who spent nine years as a producer-reporter at ABC, was one of the first journalists on the trail of the Mohamed story. "The FBI allowed the chief spy for al Qaeda to...plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses.''

A shocking new book by the 9/11 Commission co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton says Americans still don't know the whole truth about their government's initial response to those terrorist attacks that day. [The book] outlines repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration. Fog of war ... could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue. Untrue -- the military's original timeline of United Flight 93. Equally untrue, the government's timeline for American Flight 77 and details about fighter jets scrambled to intercept it. DOD did not accurately report to the 9/11 Commission on the response to the September 11, 2001 hijackings. So far, government investigators stopped short of calling all of these inaccuracies lies. If all of the after-action reports are untrue, for whatever reason, that's a lie. Incompetence and ineptitude on the part of this government ... in the weeks leading up to 9/11 are established. The fact that the government would permit deception ... the fact that they would continue and perpetuate the lie suggests that we need a full investigation of what is going on and what is demonstrably an incompetent and at worst deceitful federal government.

Note: Explore a video and transcript presenting very well documented evidence of billions of dollars of financial manipulations suggesting there is much more to 9/11 than most would think.

CARLSON: My next guest is one of the leading voices in the increasingly noisy movement that claims our own government orchestrated the attacks of September 11th. David Ray Griffin is a theology professor and a member of the group Scholars for 9/11 Truth. He's also the author of the book, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action. That book is published by the Presbyterian Church's publishing arm. Mr. Griffin...you have no evidence that the government's behind 9/11. GRIFFIN: These things have to be determined in terms of evidence. If you read this book and...my two previous books, The New Pearl Harbor, and then The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, you will see there are literally dozens of reasons to disbelieve the official theory about 9/11. CARLSON: I'm merely saying it is wrong, blasphemous, and sinful for you to suggest, imply, or help other people come to the conclusion that the U.S. government killed 3,000 of its own citizens. GRIFFIN: I thought the same thing for the first year and a half. But then when I finally looked at the evidence, I saw that it was truly overwhelming. CARLSON: You say six of the hijackers may still be alive. What's the evidence? GRIFFIN: Both the BBC and the "Telegraph" put out stories -- let's take the one about Waleed al-Shehri. Several days after 9/11, he...announced to the world that he's still alive in Morocco where he's a pilot. We didn't get a word of that from the 9/11 Commission. [The 47-story WTC] Building 7 was not hit by an airplane. CARLSON: And it came down. GRIFFIN: The 9/11 Commission did not even mention in their 571-page report the fact that Building 7 collapsed.

Note: To see the video clip on the MSNBC website, click here. Though Carlson clearly is attacking Griffin, I am thrilled that this interview was aired. At this stage, I believe any publicity is good publicity.

Kevin Barrett believes the U.S. government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners. These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University. The movement claims to be drawing fresh energy and credibility from a recently formed group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Publicity over Barrett's case has helped boost membership to about 75 academics. Some are well educated, with degrees from elite universities such as Princeton and Stanford and jobs at schools including Rice, Indiana and the University of Texas. Members of the group don't consider themselves extremists. They simply believe the government's investigation was inadequate, and maintain that questioning widely held assumptions has been part of the job of scholars for centuries. Daniel Orr, a Princeton Ph.D. and widely published retired economics chair at the University of Illinois, said he knew instantly from watching the towers fall that they had been blown apart by explosives. David Gabbard, an East Carolina education professor, acknowledges this isn't his field, but says "I'm smart enough to know ... that fire from airplanes can't melt steel." Judy Wood, until recently an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson University, has been cited by conspiracy theorists for her arguments the buildings could not have collapsed as quickly as they did unless explosives were used.

Note: This article was published on the website of more than 100 media outlets. People are waking up all over!

The Sept. 11 commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by the Pentagon and FAA about their response to the 2001 terror attacks that it considered an investigation into possible deception, the panel's chairmen say in a new book. Republican Thomas Kean and Democrat Lee Hamilton also say in "Without Precedent" that their panel was too soft in questioning former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and that the 20-month investigation may have suffered for it. The book...recounts obstacles the authors say were thrown up by the Bush administration, internal disputes over President Bush's use of the attacks as a reason for invading Iraq, and the way the final report avoided questioning whether U.S. policy in the Middle East may have contributed to the attacks. "Fog of war...could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue," the book states. The questioning of Giuliani was considered by Kean and Hamilton "a low point" in the commission's examination of witnesses during public hearings. "We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record." In their book, which goes on sale Aug. 15, Kean and Hamilton recap obstacles they say the panel faced in putting out a credible report in a presidential election year, including fights for access to government documents and an effort to reach unanimity.

More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job"...quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federal government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and that it has covered up proof of space aliens. Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks...or took no action to stop them. "One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of...the 9/11 Commission. "A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing," he said. The poll also found that 16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists. "We know that there are a lot of people now asking questions," said Janice Matthews, executive director of 911Truth.org, one of the most sophisticated Internet sites raising doubts about official explanations of the attacks. "We didn't have the Internet after Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Kennedy assassination. But we live in different times now."

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission. Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission [said], "It was just so far from the truth." In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate...and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night. For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington. In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights.

Note: Why didn't they report this in the media when the 9/11 report was issued?

Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an "inside job." Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations...had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. "The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon," said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher's assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. "The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours." Mr. Barrett's views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism. Mr. Barrett, a co-founder of a group called Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, argued that he had never presented his personal opinions in class and that he was free to offer those opinions on his own time outside the classroom. Mr. Barrett and [University of Wisconsin] Chancellor Wiley both said the controversy might actually be helping provide Mr. Barrett with a larger platform to voice his ideas.

Panelists talked about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Among the issues they addressed were various theories concerning the origins of the attacks, charges of a government and media cover-up of key facts, the results of investigations into the attacks, and public perceptions of the events of September 11, 2001. Participants...called on citizens to question official versions of the terrorist attacks, examine independent sources of information, and conduct grassroots education campaigns to change public opinion. Following their presentations they answered questions from the audience. The two-day event, "American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda," was held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown.

Note: This 105-minute program was aired on C-SPAN four times over the course of four days! Click on the links to see the schedule: July 29th, 8:00 PM, July 29th 11:00 PM, July 30th, 3:18 PM, and Aug. 1st, 6:11 PM. To view the program on C-SPAN's website as broadcast, see rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/ap072906_theories.rm or see http://www.911blogger.com/2006/07/cspans-coverage-of-american-scholars.html. We express gratitude to C-SPAN for their courage in broadcasting this program and helping people to question what really happened on that fateful day.

Wisconsin lawmakers are demanding that a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecturer be pulled from his fall teaching position because of his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were not carried out by terrorists, but by the U.S. government. Kevin Barrett...drew widespread criticism, including action from 52 Wisconsin state Assembly representatives and nine state senators [who] signed a letter last week [which] demands that Barrett be released from his lecturing post. Barrett maintains, however, that he will not present only his views in the classroom. "I present what I consider to be interesting and/or defensible positions, and urge the students to come to their own conclusions. I've been saying these things for three years on local and national radio and TV," he said. "Nobody even complained before, least of all the students." It appears he is not alone with his [views]. According to a March 2004 Gallup poll, 53 percent of those surveyed said they thought the Bush administration was covering up pre-9/11 intelligence. University of Wisconsin provost Patrick...Farrell's investigation concluded that Barrett would be a qualified instructor. Barrett is co-founder of an organization called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance. The organization says on its Web site that it is "dedicated to uniting members of the Jewish, Islamic and Christian faiths in pursuit of 9/11 truth."

Note: For why Barrett makes these claims, don't miss our two-page summary of reliable information from major media sources (links included): http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up. And for a two-star U.S. general on video questioning what really hit the Pentagon: http://www.undersiegemovie.com/media/stubblebine.wmv

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.