Verbal

All of what was and wasn't known in advance is detailed in Larwence Wright's The Looming Tower - it's really the reference book for all this. But very long story short, the people sending up red flags in the FBI and the CIA got caught in the political crossfire that happens when organisations like these get into turf wars. You might also want to look at the actions and speeches of Clinton's anti-terror adviser, Richard Clarke, who, in the transition to Bush, found that his dire warnings about OBL were ignored, and he found himself demoted, because his warnings were a distraction from Cheney's and the neo-cons' obsession with Saddam.

I don't think that's quite right, Nick. The hijackers switched off the transponders, but the planes were still visible on radar. On Flight 11, for example, the plane was tracked right up to the moment of impact with the North Tower. On the ATC screens, each plane's position is represented by a small blue or white square, with numbers attached. These numbers come from the plane's transponder, and tell ATCs about the plane's airspeed and altitude. By switching off the transponders, it's my guess - and it's only that - that the hijackers in their (relative) ignorance believed they were able to switch off their radar signature. All they actually did was switch off the numbers around the 'position' blue squares. Which reminds me of one of my biggest complaints about the conspiracy theorists. When, in 2004, we did a minute-by-minute reconstruction of what happened on Flight 11 for the History Channel, no one had done it before. No one has done it since. And a large part of the reason for that, I think is that the cretinous 'truther' extremists in the US have ruled information about what happened inside the planes out of court. It's just not relevant - or if it is, it's a complete fabrication, because the planes were obviously being flown empty by robots, or weren't even planes at all. Their antics have certainly driven some broadcasters towards the truther hotspots in the whole 9/11 story, and away from places where there's real evidence and revealing stories to tell. If the US Government is guilty of multiple cover-ups, so, in spades, are the 'truthers'.

The first sign of trouble on the day was when AA 11, on route from Boston to LA, suddenly switched off its transponder. The ATCs still had information about the plane's position, but not on other telemetry. The second sign of trouble was when the plane suddenly veered off course, working its way around a big loop. The third sign was when Atta, at the controls of the plane, mistakenly hit an intercom button that broadcast to ATCs a message that was presumably aimed at the passengers (but which they never heard). In it, he said 'We have some planes..' You have to remember the wider context. This kind of thing had never happened on US territory. Each of the danger signs were not quite unambiguous enough to trigger responses that might have prevented the plane getting all the way down the Hudson to the towers. So, yes, something was picked up by the ATCs, they did relay the message to military air controllers that they believed a hijack was underway, but it left precious little time to act, especially with various people in the chain of command saying: 'What...?!' What happened after that, and in the minutes before 175 hit, is, of course, the home territory of the conspiracy theorists.

The irony, nick, is that the more evidence there is, the less it's believed. I think I'm right in saying that there's only one piece of very fleeting video that shows the first plane hitting the towers. Consequently, there's little or no 'truther' feeding frenzy surrounding this aircraft. But Flight 175 went into the South Tower live on television, and from dozens of angles. Despite the great detail available , some of the more rabid truthers continue to deny that it was plane that hit the tower at all, but a missile. Others go on endlessly about how they've conclusive proof that it was a drone, etc, etc. Sure there are gaps, omissions, censored details, and contradictions in the 'official' story, but the 'truther' alternative - which has the 4 planes landing in a desert airstrip and the passengers and crew offloaded, executed and buried - is just plain (and I use this word advisedly) loony. We are in David Icke territory - literally.

Bexy, where do you get your poll figures from? I can find a Zogby poll in 2007 which puts the figure at 26% And a Scripp Howard poll in 2006 which puts it at a little more than a third. Nothing that puts the number at over 50%.

Good question Nick. It does sound odd - but then a lot of the 'truther' stuff is odd, and heavily mixed up in America with anti-Semites and the far right, so don't expect consistency or coherence. As to the 80 cctvs cameras, this is part of the claim, repeated ad nauseum, that there is no photographic or video evidence - or even eyewitness accounts, of a passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon. The fact is there are hundreds of photos (some of them horribly gruesome, of the remains of the passangers, together with remains of the engines, ****pit and various bits of fuselage identifying corporate logos), AND video evidence, AND eyewitnesses. (One of the funniest and most repeated claims is that key eyewitness testimony came from someone who did not exist - David Winslow. He is in fact an Associated Press reporter). And even relatively moderate 'truthers' like 911 research.org now accept that the hole in the Pentagon IS consistent with a Boeing passenger plane hitting it. The problem with many of the US 'truthers' is either that they don't know about this evidence because they are lazy and ignorant (it really doesn't take more than a few minutes to find it) or they are liars - or should that be 'liarers'.

And who's to say this professional pilot is wrong about Stanish et al? "I feel safe I will never fly with these idiots! Sorry for the idiot statement but I have seen this guys work and as a fellow pilot I apologize that some pilots are insane and let their political or religious beliefs suspend reality. Only 14 pilots! The Air Force produced 2000 pilots a year during Vietnam. There must be millions of pilots. This is good news for those who fly, only 14 out of millions of pilots are into fiction and let political or just plan mental illness issues interfere with their rational thinking."

And not forgetting: http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67816

Oh heavens, no. In fact there have been several 'corrections' over the years. And a great deal of video evidence has yet to be released (although, contrary to Bexy, there IS video and photographic evidence of Flight 77 at the Pentagon, some of it truly gruesome.) Here's a small example of one of those 'corrections' from my research for the flight 11 film. In the weeks after the attack, the papers were full of accounts of how Atta and two other co-conspirators were drinking themselves silly and 'fraternizing' in a Florida bar. It never happened. Then there are the events which are just really hard to explain. For example, why the hell did Atta and the rest of the Flight 11 attackers board a plane in Portland, Maine, on the morning of 11 Sept, rather than Logan? Than ran the serious risk of missing the AA flight altogether - and very nearly did. And then there are the really unfortunate coincidences. Almost certainly the first person to die was Daniel Lewin. He was a passenger in first class on Flight 11. He was sat direct across from two of the attackers, including Atta, and directly in front of another (He was also sat next to David Lee, the co-creator of 'Frasier'.) Lewin was an extraordinarily successful businessman - he was the owner of 'akamai', an internet company whose name you'll see flashing by as you surf the web. He was also a top-of-the-range former Israeli commando - the kind that goes undercover behind enemy lines. He was fluent in Arabic. From eye-witness accounts from the hostesses on board, he almost certainly tried to intervene. However, when we ran the details of what happened on board, his background fueled the 'truthers' into an anti-semitic frenzy. The attacks were now an Israeli conspiracy not a GWB one. The whole story of 9/11 is surrounded in a fog of information. Some of it makes sense. A lot doesn't. But what I find bizarre is the 'Matrix' view of the world that underpins the 'truther' movement and its attempts to tie all this ifnormation into a neat little conspiratorial ball. At best, it's childish paranoia. I've no doubt whatsoever that Flights 11, 175, 77 and 93 were all brought down that day by OBL's cult members. Any alternative explanation has overwhelming problems of common sense, photographic evidence (some of it too horrific to be released) and forensic detail.

I didn't insult you. I asked you if you were serious. it's an entirely reasonable question. Look, this thread began as a series of comments about the real-time film in NYC. There are some painful images in there of people moments from death. The relatives of those dead, when they've spoken of the conspiracy theories flooding the internet, express their sense of anger and distress. If the conspiracy theories you appear to be aligning with are right, there has to be an explanation as to motive and what happened to the planes, as well as the passengers and crew. I'll happily give anyone the phone numbers of some of those relatives, like Ms Ogonowski, if there is EVER a credible explanation as to where these planes and people are.

Thank god - some common sense at last. I suppose all those photos at the Pentagon crash site will be dismissed in some way as 'plants' or part of a 'false flag'. Brilliant choice of song, by the way...

All of 9/11 was a false flag op? Are you serious? I notice you're forced to quote Hitler as a precedent - plus a dim-brained JCS memo that was never implemented as 'evidence'. And this is the important point: you've come up with what I think at least is a truly half-assed precedent, not a motive. So what's your answer to the question about motive? Where are Flights 11, 175, 77 and 93? And where are the crew and passengers?

Bexy: any chance of guessing a motive? The problem with all this, if you sink too deeply into it, is that you have to try and concoct the most way-out-there motive for the US government wanting to mass-murder its own citizens in the most brutal way, in broad daylight, in a way that has repercussions that seriously damage the economy, and creates a crisis with the US's most powerful ally in the middle east. By the way, I foolishly clicked on that link supposedly 'proving' that flight 175 didn't hit the tower. Ridiculous. Is that really the best they can do, the owners of the website called 'PoliceState21'? You should be really careful what you align yourself with. Go onto their website and take a look. It would be scary if it weren't so utterly fatuous - it's full of tales about secret FEMA camps springing up over the country and progressively imprisoning the unsuspecting citizenry, The nuttiest of nutjobs who inhabit this territory fall back on the idea that the whole question of motive is preposterous - that the military-industrial complex doesn't operate with motives. It's just a 'machine'. Unfortunately, buying into this requires believing that we live in a world that's a cross between The Matrix and Terminator. By the way, if you really do believe that civilian planes didn't fly into the towers, where are the missing flights? It would be good to know. Then, for example, I can call Margaret Ogonowski, the wife of the captain of Flight 11, and tell her where her husband is.

No, it's really hard to tell. You lobbed the BBC link at me as evidence that there was a lack of firm belief in and about the FBI that they'd identified all 19 of the hijackers. But you failed to read the BBC's own retraction of the story. I'm not pointing fingers - it's something that's happened repeatedly with this story. Some reporter makes an on-the-spot remark or report that subsequently turns out to be wrong. But the indelible trail of the internet renders the error into hard fact, and it becomes grist to the mill of the conspiracy nuts. So my question is - how far down the road do you go with this stuff? I'm really curious.

Sorry? Would you mind spelling it out for me what it is you actually believe? Are you saying that the towers were brought down by Goerge W and D*ck Cheney, and the might of the American industrial-military complex? And that the thousands of people who must have been involved in this conspiracy have somehow managed to keep spectacularly schtum about the whole thing?

Sorry, Bexy, I'll answer your points when I get a moment, but thanks for making me laugh with the GWB comment. The idea that George W Bush's look of discomfort reveals anything other than his own dim wattage is a bit of a stretch. He'd look uncomfortable if you asked him to confirm his name.

Oh dear. For the third time of asking, you looked at that BBC link yet?

Good book - but his 'Report from Engine Co 82' is better. He'd retired before 9/11, by the way, and was then making his living as a despicable journalist. His description of the bodies of the 'jumpers' hitting the ground is truly horrifying.

Honestly, you're a lazy b*gger. Do you not read ANY books? Go and find out who Wright is for yourself. (I'll give you a starting clue: he works for the New Yorker.) As for the rest of your post - hilarious. Well done. You got me bang to rights.

The CIA are not in the Pentagon. They're at Langley, Virginia. And yes, Israeli robots were flying all the planes that day, and the passengers were dropped off at Area 51.

Well, the short answer is I have no idea because I haven't looked. (I know a fair bit about Flight 11 but not 77) But when these kinds of questions come up, it's not a bad idea to start from the supposition that the assumption behind the question is itself questionable. So rather than 'why no video evidence', how about 'is there any video evidence?' This is one of those stories where - hardly surprisingly - a lot more is known by officials of various kinds than is 'out there' in the public domain. This is usually for mundane, non-conspiratorial reasons - like the fact that 9/11 is still an open criminal investigation. (No one with a proven direct connection to the attacks has ever been put on trial. The idiot Zacarius Moussaoui doesn't count!)

So did you read the BBC article in that link? Care to revise your opinion? I have no doubt that this debate is essentially driven by some deeply paranoid people, so 'loonies' is a pretty good term I think. You should try engaging with these people. When my film on flight 11 went out, I was accused by 'truth-speakers' who published my address and phone number of being an 'Israeli Psyops officer'. Quite funny really. And loony.

Google 'Popular Mechanics'. They devoted a whole issue and a subsequent book to the questions that supposedly 'don't add up'. Again, it's always not a bad idea to listen to what real and dispassionate experts say, rather than the loony tunes chorus on the www.

A surprising number of those questions are addressed in The Looming Tower. I'm really not Wright's agent (!) but it should be required reading for ANYONE interested in the background to 9/11. Some of your questions are just wrong. although for understandable reasons. I can't remember the exact detail, but my recollection is that the reference to boxcutters from first-hand recorded comments by the passengers themselves only came from one flight - 77 (the one that flew into the Pentagon.) There's a bit of a backstory to the boxcutters. The airlines like the idea becase boxcutters were not at that time illegal if carried onto planes. Knives, on the other hand... I made a film about Flight 11 for the History Channel in the US and for Five here, and have listened to all the recordings made from that flight, from flight attendants to passengers. There was no reference to boxcutters. Nor did the hijackers wear headbands. Nor did the hijackers tell the passengers what they were doing. Nor did the majority of passengers even know the plane was hijacked - right up to the moment the plane crashed. All this is based, as I say, on listening to the recordings and talking first-hand to people like the wife of the captain that day, the AA ground controller in more or less constant phone contact with one of the hostesses, and spouses of passengers.