05
Show Notes
The notes begin with time-stamps corresponding to their chronological position in the podcast. Occasional Clarifications are included where I did not mention certain salient points which in all instances strengthen the case for suspicion; these are highlighted.
In some cases the notes link to PDFs on Elias Davidsson’s website; these are chosen with a view to the unlikelihood of the links’ dying and can be verified as reflecting their originals through a search engine.
The conversation is based on Elias Davidsson’s book, Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11 (Algora Publishing, New York: 2013).
Elias Davidsson’s website: juscogens.org or aldeilis.net
9:00 Davidsson’s discussion of the strategic context of the lack of an enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the need for a new enemy to be created, is found in his unpublished manuscript, The Betrayal of America.
16:49 The story that the FBI had “no hard evidence” linking Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks, originally published by Ed Haas in the Muckraker Report in 2006. The Washington Post‘s responsive article, which did not include the phrase “no hard evidence”, by Dave Eggen, 28 August, 2006 (“Bin Laden, Most Wanted for Embassy Bombings?”). Clarification: I ought to have stressed in the podcast that the phrase is not talismanic. Rather, the point is, it means the FBI had no evidence that would stand up in a criminal trial.
18:50 Letter of John Negroponte, the United States Representative to the UN Security Council, on the day of the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, 7 October 2001, which also failed to link Osama bin Laden to 9/11.
23:00 The immediate propagandistic establishment of guilt in regard to 9/11 is evidenced by the Draft Resolution presented to the US Senate by Senator Tom Daschle on 12 September 2001. The 1 October 2001 cable to US embassies for use in briefing international governments, stating that the United States is “not obliged in any way to make any kind of showing as a prerequisite to the exercise of its right of self-defense”.
26:02 The FBI’s 14 September 2001 list of 19 hijackers, most without dates of birth or certain identifications, effectively a list of suspects. Examples, among others, of changes of hijackers’ identities (emphasising the uncertainty of the origin of all the purported hijackers’ identities and of the process by which they were supposedly ascertained) in the days around the 14 September list are: the expectation reported by CNN on September 14 that the Department of Justice would name “Mosear Caned” as a suspected hijacker; the report of the Washington Post on 16 September that original passenger lists had not included Hani Hanjour alongside the Attorney General John Ashcroft’s declaration on 13 September that there were only four hijackers on AA77, Hanjour’s flight; a CNN report on 14 September, attributed to “federal sources” identifying Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Bukhari as hijackers on a plane from Boston, corrected that day by CNN to being pilots on the planes (note the plurals) that crashed into the World Trade Center (their names subsequently disappeared).
39:10 The footage of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi purporting to come from Dulles Airport, but without information identifying the camera or the time and date of its recording.
46:05 A sampling of what Davidsson describes as the “dozen or more eyewitnesses with full names who came there [to the crash site at Shanksville, Pennsylvania] and said ‘we didn’t see anything that reminded us of an aircraft'” who gave their testimony to media a short time after 9/11:
- Mark Stahl, a salesman who arrived at the scene 15 minutes after crash time, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that he did not realise a passenger jet had crashed until he was told. “It’s unbelievable.” He told CNN: “The plane is pretty much disintegrated. There’s nothing left but scorched trees”.
- Wells Morrison, a local FBI agent, told Glenn Kashurba, a local child psychiatrist who wrote about the response to the event, that his first thought was “Where is the plane?” “What I saw was this honeycomb looking stuff, which I believe is insulation or something like that. I was not seeing anything that was distinguishable either as human remains or aircraft debris” (cited in Jere Longman’s Among the Heroes, HarperCollins: 2002).
- Frank Monaco, of the Pennsylvania State Police, commented, as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that “If you would go down there, it would look like a trash heap. There’s nothing but tiny pieces of debris.”
- Jon Meyer, a reporter for WJAC-TV, said “I was able to get right up to the edge of the crater… All I saw was a crater filled with small charred plane parts, Nothing that would even tell you that it was the plane… There were no suitcases, no recognisable plane parts, no body parts. The crater was about 30 to 35 feet deep.”
- Wallace Miller, Somerset County’s coroner, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “It was as if the the plane had stopped and let the passengers off before it crashed”. He made many similar comments during the period 2001-02, as outlined by the excellent researcher ‘Shoestring’.
48:20 The suspicious turning-up of evidence at the Shanksville site after 14 September is evidenced in the podcast by my mention of a pristine red bandana presented in evidence at the post-9/11 Moussaoui trial. Clarification: I should have added that these red bandanas were supposed to have been worn by the hijackers, making the failure to locate their bodies all the more remarkable. The wearing of red bandanas was mentioned by the flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw (FBI 302-95686 and 302-526) and the passenger Jeremy Glick (FBI 302-6390 and 302-11722), though not by other callers from UA93.
52:43 In regard to falsely incriminating evidence being planted by US officials at aircraft crash sites, see the following articles about, as mentioned in the podcast, the Lockerbie bombing: “Police chief – Lockerbie evidence was faked” (The Scotsman, 28/8/05); “The Framing of al-Megrahi” (LRB, 24/9/09) “Vital Lockerbie evidence ‘was made AFTER the doomed flight crashed’ “ (Scottish Daily Mail, 16/12/18); Wikipedia on the Lockerbie bombing investigation.
54:20 Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick A. Rose’s letter to Nevada District U.S. Court indicating that no formal identification by the FBI of the airplanes said to have been crashed on 9/11 took place. (Letter also available on PACER.)
59:15 Documentation relating to the flight of UA93 and UA175 past their alleged crash times comes in the form of the ACARS logs of Ed Ballinger, United Airlines’ flight dispatcher for East to West coast flights on 9/11. ACARS stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. Its basic mechanism is described in the podcast: centrally dispatched messages are sent to a ground station closest to the flying aircraft they are intended for and then transmitted to the plane. Appearance in the logs conveys that the message was received without problem by the airplane, an important consideration.
Using the linked-to PDF edition of the ACARS log as a reference, and taking the crashed planes in turn, the following are among the critical details suggesting the flights were not at their supposed locations at the time of the crashes:
- UA 175 On p. 3 of the PDF, the plane, whose registration (“tail”) number is quoted as N612UA, is logged as having had a message sent to it by Jerry Tsen at 09111259, which is 1259 Universal Coordinated Time, or 8:59 Eastern Time, and this was transmitted to the plane through MDT, which stands for Harrisburg International Airport, in Pennsylvania. On p. 4 at 09111303 a message is again transmitted to the plane through MDT (Harrisburg). This is 9:03 Eastern Time, the minute UA 175 was said to have crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center!
- UA 93 On p. 51 of the PDF, the plane, whose registration (“tail”) number is quoted as N591UA, is logged as having had a message sent to it by Ed Ballinger at 09111410, which is 1410 Universal Coordinated Time, or 10:10 Eastern Time, and this was transmitted to the plane through CMI, which stands for Willard Airport, Champaign County, in Illinois. This was seven minutes after UA93’s stated crash time at 10:03 in Somerset County!
Further details suggesting a logical course for these flights can be derived from the ACARS log and is contained in Davidsson’s book. Readers are encouraged to independently verify matters such as the aeroplane registration numbers, time differences, and airport codes. Details about the original copy of the Ballinger ACARS log is available from the National Archive’s Catalog online, and the reference for the physical copy is as follows: “9/11 Commission documents, NARA, Team 7, Box 13 Flight 11 Calls Folder – Response from DOJ to Doc Req 14 Calls”.
Strengthening the likelihood that UA93 was located, to quote Davidsson, “500 miles away from Pennsylvania seven minutes after the alleged crash time” is Col. Robert Marr’s concern on 9/11 that UA93 was “circling over Chicago”, which corresponds with the Illinois location given in the ACARS log (9/11 Commission MFR 03012970)
1:04:05 Operation Northwoods, which I invited Davidsson to talk about, and about which he declined to do so, on the grounds that it could be a distraction from the obligation of the accusers, the U.S. Government, to prove its case. He focused instead on the reasonableness of drawing an inference from its failure even to advance a plausible case, and he writes further about that question in his article, “The question of negative proof and 9/11” (19/9/08)
Transcript
Not available