In his fifth thesis, Sunstein makes the following threefold claim:

The 9/11 conspiracy theory is “demonstrably false”; it is also “unjustified,” being based on evidence that is “weak or even nonexistent”; and it has led to a “degenerating research program.”

Actually, what is demonstrably false as well as unjustified is this thesis itself—when evaluated at the exoteric level, with which we begin.

The first part of this thesis—that the position of the 9/11 Truth Movement is demonstrably false—can be dismissed quickly, for three reasons.

First, Sunstein gives absolutely no evidence for this claim. As a lawyer, he surely knows that he cannot expect people to accept his claims unless he gives some evidence for them. If the theory in question has been demonstrated, or at least could be demonstrated, to be false, one would assume that Sunstein would inform readers of some of the evidence that would provide this demonstration, or at least tell them where they can find it.

Second, if the theory in question were indeed demonstrably false, one would not expect it to be accepted by growing numbers of professional people—such as architects, engineers, firefighters, intelligence officers, journalists, medical professionals, pilots, political leaders, religious leaders, scientists, and veterans—but it is, as we saw in the previous chapter.

Third, if the 9/11 Truth Movement’s theory were indeed demonstrably false, we would expect that, insofar as there are conversions from one 9/11 conspiracy theory to the other, the conversions would be primarily from the 9/11 Truth Movement’s theory to the official theory. But the conversions go almost entirely in the opposite direction. These conversions, moreover, are almost always irreversible: Every year, we learn of more people who have been converted from the official to the alternative theory. But we seldom hear of people who, after having accepted the views of the 9/11 Truth Movement, have switched back to the official theory. (The only exceptions seem to be cases in which people came to see their expressions of support for the 9/11 Truth Movement as posing threats to their careers. )

The “theory” of the 9/11 Truth Movement, at the most fundamental level, is that the official story, according to which the attacks were planned and carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists, is false, and that the falsity of this story implies that 9/11 was, at least partly, an inside job. Contrary to Sunstein’s claim that the evidence for this position is weak or nonexistent, it is extremely strong. It points, moreover, to the falsity of virtually every aspect of the official story.

I begin with evidence against the idea that the attacks were carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the inspiration of Osama bin Laden.

No Hard Evidence for Bin Laden’s Responsibility: At the foundation of the official account of 9/11 is the claim that Osama bin Laden ordered the attacks. As Edward Haas of the Muckraker Report learned, however, the FBI does not list 9/11 as one of the terrorist acts for which he is wanted. The reason, Haas was told in 2006 by the FBI’s head of investigative publicity, Rex Tomb, was that “the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

When Todd Leventhal, head of the US State Department’s “counter-misinformation” office, was asked about this fact, he tried to dismiss it as of no significance, saying:

The FBI poster says he [Osama bin Laden] is wanted for the August 7, 1988 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, for which he was formally indicted. But he has not yet been formally charged with the September 11 attacks in a U.S. court of law, so he is not wanted for this reason. This was explained by an FBI spokesman and others knowledgeable about such matters in an August 28, 2006 article in The Washington Post.

The question, however, is why bin Laden “has not yet been formally charged with the September 11 attacks.” This question was not answered, in spite of Leventhal’s suggestion to the contrary, in the Washington Post article to which Leventhal referred, which was by Dan Eggen. After pointing out the absence of any reference to 9/11 among the terrorist acts for which the FBI wants bin Laden, Eggen wrote:

The absence has . . . provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings. From this point of view, the lack of a Sept. 11 reference suggests that the connection to al-Qaeda is uncertain. . . . FBI officials say the wanted poster merely reflects the government’s long-standing practice of relying on actual criminal charges in the notices.

Like Leventhal, hence, Eggen simply reported that “actual criminal charges” had not been filed; he did not explain why not.

Further seeking to justify the fact that the FBI’s “most wanted” pages on bin Laden do not list him as wanted for 9/11, Eggen quoted David N. Kelley, a former US attorney in New York, as saying:

It might seem a little strange from the outside, but it makes sense from a legal point of view. . . . If I were in government, I’d be troubled if I were asked to put up a wanted picture where no formal charges had been filed, no matter who it was.

It is certainly true that the FBI could not list bin Laden as wanted for a crime if he has not been formally charged with that crime. The question at hand, however, is why “no formal charges had been filed.” Eggen, Kelley, and Leventhal all dodged this question.

This question had been clearly answered, however, by Rex Tomb, who said in response to Haas’s question:

Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11. . . . The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, Bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.

The answer could not be clearer: The Department of Justice did not indict bin Laden for 9/11 because the FBI did not provide it with any hard evidence of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. If Todd Leventhal were a truthful public servant, he would have pointed out that it was Tomb, rather than Eggen, who had answered the question. It would appear, however, that Leventhal is a propagandist.

This appearance is confirmed in an article by him entitled “Al Qaida Confirms It Carried Out the September 11 Attacks.” Beginning with two standard claims of the Bush–Cheney conspiracy theory, Leventhal wrote: “Both Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, have confirmed that al Qaida planned and carried out the September 11 attacks.”

Leventhal sought to buttress the bin Laden part of this claim by referring to several audio- and videotapes, in which bin Laden supposedly confessed. In doing so, however, Leventhal simply presupposed the truth of a disputed assumption, namely, that these “Osama bin Laden confession tapes” are authentic. Leventhal, for example, wrote:

The first direct indication of al Qaida involvement came in a videotape of bin Laden talking to a group of supporters in November 2001, which was obtained by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late November and released on December 13, 2001. Independent scholars gave [sic] verified that the translation released by the U.S. government is accurate.

Leventhal failed to mention the fact that many other independent researchers have declared this video a fake (an issue that was raised in the press at the time of the video’s release ). For example, when Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, widely considered America’s leading academic bin Laden expert, was asked about this tape, he said, “It’s bogus,” adding that friends of his in the Department of Homeland Security “also know it’s bogus.” There were at least five reasons why Lawrence and others made this judgment.

First, bin Laden had previously denied his involvement in the 9/11 attacks many times. Second, although the US military claimed that it had found the tape in a house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, it provided no evidence to support this claim. Third, although this tape was supposedly made on November 9, its bin Laden figure is obviously much healthier than bin Laden was when he made a tape on November 3 and also when he made one sometime between November 16 (the date of the US bombing of the mosque at Khost, which is mentioned by bin Laden in the video) and December 27 (the date on which the video was released by the US government)—at which time he had a white beard and a “gaunt, frail appearance,” according to London’s Telegraph, and seemed to be suffering from kidney disease and a stroke, according to Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Fourth, some of the physical features of the man in the video are different from those of the Osama bin Laden of undoubtedly authentic videos.

The fifth reason for considering this video a fake is that the man in the video said several things that the real bin Laden, even if he had planned the 9/11 attacks, would not have said. Talking about the fact that the Twin Towers collapsed totally, for example, the tape’s bin Laden figure said that he was “thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only.” Being an engineer, the real bin Laden would have known that iron (or steel) does not melt until it reaches about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a thousand degrees higher than the fires—as diffuse, hydrocarbon fires—could have possibly reached.

Another video in which bin Laden confessed to the 9/11 attacks, according to Leventhal, appeared on October 30, 2004. But Leventhal simply ignored the fact that many features of this video suggest that it was a fake. Although he pointed out that it appeared on October 30, he failed to mention the significance of this date: that it was just a few days before the 2004 presidential election, in which voters would choose between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Other relevant but unmentioned points are that CIA officials said that the tape seemed intended to help Bush, and that both Bush and Kerry later said that it did, in fact, help Bush win. Leventhal also did not mention that, whereas bin Laden’s talks normally employed religious language heavily and portrayed historical events as divinely ordained, this one was very different, employing few religious terms and providing a purely secular analysis of historical developments. Leventhal also failed to point out, finally, that although this talk was addressed to the American people, the person in this video spoke in Arabic—even though the real bin Laden could speak English impeccably.

It is not only Bruce Lawrence and members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, moreover, who consider these tapes inauthentic. The same judgment has been made by former CIA operative Robert Baer, and also by former Foreign Service officer Angelo Codevilla, who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University and a senior editor of the American Spectator.

In any case, the remainder of Leventhal’s article consists of excerpts from The 9/11 Commission Report, which, he claimed, “confirms that al Qaida planned and executed the attacks.” The Commission’s “reconstruction of events,” Leventhal pointed out, was “based largely on information provided by [alleged] September 11 planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi Binalshibh, and others.”

Leventhal did not point out, however, that this “information” was provided to the Commission by the CIA and that, because of the CIA’s stance, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton—the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the 9/11 Commission—called it untrustworthy. On page 146 of The 9/11 Commission Report—the second page of Chapter 5—they inserted a box stating:

Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. . . . Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses . . . is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. . . . [W]e [were not] allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify the ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.

Having not reported this caveat, Leventhal certainly did not report Kean and Hamilton’s even stronger statements in 2006 and 2008.

In their 2006 book Without Precedent, subtitled The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, Kean and Hamilton complained that, besides having no success in “obtaining access to star witnesses in custody . . . , most notably Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” they also were not permitted to observe his interrogation through one-way glass or even to talk to the interrogators. Therefore, Kean and Hamilton wrote:

“We . . . had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information. How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . . . was telling us the truth?”

The obvious answer, of course, was that they could not.

In 2008, after it had been revealed that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its interviews of al-Qaeda detainees—the very interviews about which the 9/11 Commission had sought to get information—Kean and Hamilton wrote a New York Times Op-Ed piece charging the CIA with obstruction. Besides reporting the CIA’s refusal to allow them access to the al-Qaeda detainees, which led to their “caveats on page 146 in the commission report,” they wrote: “The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded,” even though the 9/11 Commission “did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes. . . . We call that obstruction.”

So, in addition to saying in 2006 that they “had no way of evaluating the credibility of [the information reportedly supplied by al-Qaeda detainees] such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Kean and Hamilton stated in 2008 that the CIA was guilty of obstruction for refusing to turn over, or even to acknowledge the existence of, videotapes of the interrogations—videotapes that gave the lie to the CIA’s claim that for it to fulfill the 9/11 Commission’s request to observe the interrogations “might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process.”

As for the real reason for the CIA’s refusal to allow these videotapes to be viewed by people outside the agency, there have been various speculations. One is that it was to conceal the fact that torture had been employed to obtain the information. But another suggested explanation is that it was to conceal the fact that these men did not really make all of the statements attributed to them, which would mean that the CIA had simply made up some of the claims that it attributed to al-Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Given the information currently available, we cannot, of course, say that this was the real reason. But we also cannot say that it was not.

In any case, Kean and Hamilton have themselves made abundantly clear that the narrative about Osama bin Laden in The 9/11 Commission Report is not trustworthy. But Todd Leventhal, providing propaganda for the US State Department in 2009, wrote as if this issue had never been raised.

Alleged Hijackers Not Devout Muslims: The official story holds that the four airliners were hijacked by devout Muslims ready to die as martyrs to earn a heavenly reward. “Ringleader” Mohamed Atta, in particular, was said by the 9/11 Commission to have become very religious, even “fanatically so.” But numerous reports indicated otherwise. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported that Atta and other hijackers had made “at least six trips” to Las Vegas, where they had “engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic sampling of prohibited pleasures.” Even in the days immediately before 9/11, when young Muslim men planning for martyrdom would presumably have been preparing themselves for their heavenly reward, Atta and others were reported to be drinking heavily, cavorting with lap dancers, and bringing call girls to their rooms. This incongruous behavior was even noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial with an ironic title, “Terrorist Stag Parties.”

Alleged Hijackers Not on Passenger Manifests: Besides not being devout Muslims, the “hijackers” were evidently not even on the airliners. One basis for this conclusion is the set of passenger manifests for the four flights. A passenger manifest lists all the passengers on a flight, so if the alleged hijackers had purchased tickets and boarded the flights, as the official story has it, their names would have been on the manifests. But the four flight manifests released by the airlines after 9/11 have none of their names, not even any Middle Eastern names.

No Arab Names on Flight 77 Autopsy List: Having noted that there were no Middle Eastern names on the flight manifests, Dr. Thomas Olmsted—a psychiatrist and former naval officer—sent a FOIA request to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology to obtain the autopsy list for American Flight 77. Fourteen months later, he reported in June 2003, he finally received the list. What he discovered was indicated by the title of his report: “Still No Arabs on Flight 77.”

No Pilot Squawked the Hijack Code: Perhaps the strongest evidence against hijackers is provided by a feature of the reported events that contradicts the claim that hijackers broke into the pilots’ cabins. If pilots suspect that an attempted hijacking is in progress, they are to enter the standard hijack code (7500) into their transponders, thereby alerting FAA flight controllers on the ground. This task takes only two to three seconds, so there would have been plenty of time for at least one of the pilots in each cockpit to do this. According to the official report of Flight 93, for example, it took 30 seconds for the hijackers to break into its cockpit. And yet neither pilot entered the hijack code into the transponder. What stronger evidence could there be that there were no hijackers breaking into cockpits?

Alleged Hijackers Show Up Alive: Further evidence that the men accused of hijacking the planes did not do so is supplied by the fact that some of them, such as Waleed al-Shehri, said to have been one of the men who hijacked American Flight 11, later showed up alive. About two weeks after 9/11, the BBC reported that “the same Mr. Al-Shehri [as the one named a hijacker by the FBI] has turned up in Morocco, proving clearly that he was not a member of the suicide attack.” Defenders of the official story, including the BBC itself five years later, tried to debunk this story as a mere case of mistaken identity, claiming that al-Shehri’s photograph had not been released at the time he spoke to the press. But that was not true, as shown by the original BBC story and additional facts. Several more of the 19 men also pointed out the inconvenient fact that they were still alive.

Planted Evidence: However, one might well ask, if there were no hijackers on the flights, how do we explain the evidence that there were? The answer: By providing good reasons to believe that it was planted or otherwise fabricated. I will illustrate such reasons in terms of four types of alleged evidence for Muslim hijackers on the planes: Reported cell phone calls from the airliners; the reported phone calls from Barbara Olson; the passports reportedly found at the crash sites; and a headband reportedly found at one of these sites.

Reported Cell Phone Calls from the Airliners: For most people, the main evidence that the planes had been taken over by Muslim hijackers was provided by reported phone calls from the planes, with cell phone calls playing an especially important role. Shortly after the attacks, for example, a Washington Post story, referring to United Flight 93, said:

The plane was at once a lonesome vessel, the people aboard facing their singular fate, and yet somehow already attached to the larger drama, connected again by cell phones.

Another story in the Post said:

[P]assenger Jeremy Glick used a cell phone to tell his wife, Lyzbeth, . . . that the Boeing 757’s cockpit had been taken over by three Middle Eastern-looking men. . . . Glick’s cell phone call from Flight 93 and others like it provide the most dramatic accounts so far of events aboard the four hijacked aircraft.

According to a story about a “cellular phone conversation” between flight attendant Sandra Bradshaw and her husband:

She said the plane had been taken over by three men with knives. She had gotten a close look at one of the hijackers. . . . “He had an Islamic look,” she told her husband.

About fifteen of the reported phone calls from the planes were believed to have been made on cell phones. This information came from the recipients, who gave reasons to believe that the callers had used cell phones. The strongest evidence was provided by Deena Burnett, who told the FBI, according to its report, that she had received “a series of three to five cellular phone calls from her husband.” She was certain that her husband had used his cell phone, she said, because she had recognized his number on her phone’s Caller ID. But these calls were reportedly made when the planes were above 30,000 feet, and cell phone calls from airliners at such altitudes—as pilots and scientists pointed out—were impossible in 2001, given the cell phone technology available at the time. It would appear, therefore, that the reported calls from Tom Burnett, along with all of the other reported high-altitude cell phone calls, had somehow been faked.

Reported Phone Calls from Barbara Olson: The most important of all the reported phone calls were those attributed to Barbara Olson, the wife of US Solicitor General Theodore “Ted” Olson and a well-known commentator on CNN. On 9/11, Ted Olson told CNN and the FBI that his wife had called him from American Flight 77, the airliner that supposedly struck the Pentagon. She had called him twice, he said, reporting that “all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane” by hijackers, who were armed with “knives and cardboard cutters.”

One problem with this story was that it would require us to believe that a few rather small men—“The so-called muscle hijackers,” the 9/11 Commission pointed out, “were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5” and 5’7” in height and slender in build” )—armed only with knives and box-cutters, could have held off sixty-some passengers and crew members, who included pilot Charles “Chic” Burlingame, a former navy pilot who was a weightlifter and a boxer.

A second problem involved the type of phone used by Barbara Olson. Ted Olson himself expressed uncertainty: He told the FBI, according to its report, that he did not know “if the calls were made from her cell phone or the telephone on the plane”; and in his public statements, he sometimes suggested that she had used a cell phone, while at other times he said she must have used an onboard phone.

Both positions, however, were impossible. On the one hand, the plane would have been too high for cell phone calls, because her first call, according to the 9/11 Commission, occurred “between 9:16 and 9:26am,” at which time Flight 77, the official report says, would have been somewhere between 25,000 and 14,000 feet. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a 2004 FBI report ruled out the cell phone option, saying: “All of the calls from Flight 77 were made via the onboard airphone system.” On the other hand, American Airlines’ Boeing 757s did not have onboard phones. This information, which was provided by an American Airlines representative in 2004, was confirmed in 2006 by another AA representative, who said: “[W]e do not have phones on our Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack.”

It would appear, therefore, that there was no way in which Barbara Olson could have called her husband from American Flight 77, so his report must have been untrue—a conclusion that, we will see below, the FBI came to support.

Passports at the Crash Sites: Another purported proof that the nineteen Muslim men identified as the hijackers were on the planes was provided by passports reportedly found at the crash sites. But these passports were almost definitely planted, as two examples will illustrate. One of them involved the passport of Satam al-Suqami, said to have been a hijacker on American Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower. The FBI claimed that his passport was found on the street later in the day. But for this to be true, the passport would have had to survive the collapse of the North Tower, which for some reason pulverized almost everything in the building except its steel into fine particles of dust. This story did not pass the giggle test: “[T]he idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged,” remarked a British commentator, “would [test] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.”

A second example involved the passport of Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of United Flight 93, which supposedly crashed in Pennsylvania. Jarrah’s passport was reportedly found on the ground at the crash site, even though there was virtually nothing else at the site to indicate that an airliner had crashed there. The reason for this absence of wreckage, we were told, was that the plane had been headed downward at 580 miles per hour and, when it hit the spongy Pennsylvania soil, it buried itself entirely in the ground—“as if a marble had been dropped into water,” a New York Times writer explained. Besides being asked to swallow that, we are supposed to imagine that, just before the plane buried itself in the ground, Jarrah’s passport escaped from his pocket or luggage and the cockpit, just in time to fall to the ground where it could be discovered.

A Red Headband at the Site: The FBI also reportedly found a red headband at the Pennsylvania crash site. This was significant because some of the reported phone calls from the planes described the hijackers as wearing red headbands. According to Jeremy Glick’s wife, for example, he reported that “the Boeing 757’s cockpit had been taken over by three Middle Eastern-looking men. . . wearing red headbands. But former CIA agent Milt Bearden, who had helped train the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, pointed out that, whereas al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization, the red headband is a uniquely Shi’a adornment. Many of us remember that, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, some leading figures of the Bush administration were unaware of the difference between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims. Did one of those people decide that the hijackers would be described as wearing red headbands?

Hani Hanjour as Pilot of American Flight 77: The claim that the planes were taken over and flown by Muslim hijackers is further disproved by the absurdity of the claim that Hani Hanjour took control of American Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon. Hanjour was known to be a terrible pilot. According to a New York Times story entitled “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence,” one of Hanjour’s instructors said: “He could not fly at all.” A couple of months before 9/11, moreover, a flight instructor, who had gone up with him once in a single-engine plane, refused to do it again, considering it too dangerous.

According to the official story, nevertheless, Hanjour was able, the first time he had flown a giant airliner, to do so with almost superhuman skill. The day after the attacks, before Hanjour had been identified as the pilot of the plane that approached the Pentagon, a Washington Post story said: “[T]he unidentified pilot executed a pivot so tight that it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver.” This trajectory would have been so difficult for a Boeing 757 that pilots with years of experience flying these planes have said they could not have done it. “The idea that an unskilled pilot could have flown this trajectory,” said one of them, “is simply too ridiculous to consider.”

The Choice of Wedge 1 to Target: Even if Hanjour, or some other al-Qaeda operative, could have executed that maneuver, moreover, there is every reason to believe that he would not have done so. This maneuver was necessary only because the target was the side of Wedge 1, but this would have been about the least desirable target for al-Qaeda operatives. They surely would have wanted to kill Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s top brass, who were on the opposite side of the Pentagon; al-Qaeda operatives would have wanted to cause as much death and destruction as possible, but Wedge 1, and it alone, had been renovated to make it less vulnerable to attack; and the renovation was not quite complete, so this area was only sparsely occupied. Al-Qaeda masterminds, being brilliant enough to outfox the most sophisticated defense system in history, would have known that they could cause far more destruction and kill far more people—including the most important ones—simply by having the plane hit a much easier target: the roof above the offices of the Pentagon’s top officials.

Secret Service Failure to Hustle Bush to Safety: Further evidence that the airliners were not under the control of al-Qaeda pilots, or any foreign terrorists for that matter, was provided by the behavior of the Secret Service detail with President Bush while he was at a school in Sarasota, Florida. Upon being told after his arrival about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, Bush dismissed it as an accident. But after word was received about the second plane, it would have been obvious that “America [was] under attack”—which is reportedly what Bush’s chief of staff whispered in his ear. And yet Bush’s Secret Service detail allowed him to remain at the school for another 30 minutes, thereby making him—along with everyone else at the school, including the Secret Service agents themselves—an easy target for another hijacked airliner planning to strike a high-value target. Had the Secret Service thought Bush was in any danger, they would have followed their standard protocol in such situations, which, as the St. Petersburg Times put it, was to “hustle Bush to a secure location.”

Although the official 9/11 conspiracy theory says that the airliners were able to hit their targets because of mistakes made by FAA and military personnel (for which no one was ever punished or even publicly reprimanded), the alternative theory holds that there was a plan within the US military to prevent the airliners from being intercepted.

Standard Operating Procedures: According to the best-supported version of this theory, there was a stand-down order, canceling standard operating procedures. This view is based on the fact that the FAA and the military have worked out such procedures, according to which any airplane in the United States showing signs of an in-flight emergency is normally intercepted within about 10 minutes, combined with the fact that, on the morning of 9/11, this did not happen.

The official account of 9/11 maintains that the system simply failed in relation to all four planes. For example, the FAA knew by 8:21 that American Flight 11 was not responding to radio messages and had gone radically off course, and yet 25 minutes later, when this airliner slammed into the North Tower, military interceptor jets had not even taken off. Another example: The FAA notified the military at 9:24 that American Flight 77 had turned around and was headed back toward Washington, and yet when it struck the Pentagon 14 minutes later, no interceptor jets were anywhere near. Given the speed with which fighters on alert normally intercept troubled aircraft, the failures on 9/11 are understandable only on the assumption that those standard procedures were suspended.

LAX Security Heard Discussing Stand-Down Order: The deduction that there must have been a stand-down has been supported by testimony from Charles E. Lewis, who had worked on security systems at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) prior to 9/11. Having rushed back to the airport that morning in case his expertise was needed, he listened to very upset LAX security officers getting information about the attacks on their walkie-talkies. At first, they were upset because they heard that the attacks had succeeded due to FAA failure to notify the military. They soon became even more upset upon learning that the military had been informed but had not responded, because it had been “ordered to stand down.” Asking who had issued this order, they were told that it had come “from the highest level of the White House.” With President Bush down in Florida, that would have meant Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s Confirmation of a Stand-Down Order: That Cheney had, in fact, issued a stand-down order was inadvertently reported by Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta during his testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Speaking of an exchange he had witnessed in the bunker under the White House—officially known as the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC—where Vice-President Cheney was in charge, Mineta said:

During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?”

As to what these “orders” were, Mineta assumed, he said, that they were to shoot the plane down. But there was no shootdown of the aircraft that approached the Pentagon. Also, given the fact that two hijacked airliners had already crashed into high-value targets, the expected orders in relation to any unidentified aircraft approaching the Pentagon would have been to shoot it down. So if those had been the orders, the young man would have had no reason to ask whether they “still stand.” The only reasonable interpretation, therefore, is that Mineta had witnessed the vice-president confirming a previously given stand-down order. (Further evidence for this interpretation will be given in the section headed “A Degenerating Research Program?”)

For science-oriented members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, the strongest case for rejecting the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory is provided by evidence that its account of the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7—according to which all three buildings came down because two of them were struck by airliners—could not possibly be true. Here are some of those reasons:

The Total Collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7: Prior to 9/11, steel-frame high-rise buildings had never suffered total collapse from any cause other than controlled demolition by means of pre-set explosives and incendiaries. NIST claims that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down by gravity after they were weakened by fire. But fires in the South and North Towers lasted only 56 and 102 minutes, respectively, whereas fires in other steel-frame buildings have lasted 10, 17, and 18 hours without inducing even partial collapse.

NIST claims, to be sure, that the Twin Towers come down partly because of the airplane impacts, which (allegedly) severed some of the steel columns, thereby creating big holes, which then caused each building’s top section to fall down on the lower section, causing it to collapse.

In actual fact, however, the top sections did not come down as solid units, but instead disintegrated in mid-air, so there were no discernible “jolts” when the top sections encountered the lower sections. In an analysis of the North Tower collapse, moreover, mechanical engineer Gordon Ross asked what would have happened—assuming that the “collapse [was] driven only by gravity”—even if the top section as a solid unit had in fact fallen onto the lower section. So much energy would have been absorbed by the lower structure, he concluded, that “vertical movement of the falling section would [have been] arrested . . . within 0.02 seconds after impact,” so that it “would not [have] continue[d] to progress beyond that point.”

Building 7 of the World Trade Center, moreover, also suffered total collapse, even though it was not hit by a plane. Its collapse, therefore, had to be attributed solely to its fires, even though this building merely had some localized fires, lasting at best only a few hours, on six of its 47 floors. And yet, as mentioned already, even buildings that have become towering infernos, with fires lasting up to 18 hours, have not collapsed, even partially.

The official accounts of the World Trade Center are rendered extremely implausible, therefore, solely by virtue of the fact that these three buildings suffered total collapse. But there are even more decisive reasons for calling these accounts false.

Horizontal Ejections from the Twin Towers: The destruction of the Twin Towers began with huge explosions near the top, which ejected material out horizontally. Included in this material were massive sections of steel columns that were hurled out 500 to 600 feet, a few of which implanted themselves in neighboring buildings, as can be seen in videos and photographs. This feature of the destruction of the Twin Towers provides virtually irrefutable evidence against the official account, according to which the only force available, beyond that supplied by the airplane impacts and the resulting fires, was gravitational attraction, which pulls things straight down. Engineer Dwain Deets, mentioned above in Chapter 4, has said that these “massive structural members being hurled horizontally” is one of the factors that “leave no doubt” in his mind that “explosives were involved.”

Vertical, Symmetrical Collapses: WTC 7 was supported by 82 vertical steel columns, and yet it came straight down, in an almost perfectly symmetrical collapse. This means that all of its 82 steel columns failed simultaneously. Structural engineer Kamal Obeid, saying that for this to have occurred without the use of explosives would have been an “impossibility,” has thereby expressed the view of the 1,200-plus members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The same point applies to the Twin Towers, each of which was supported by 287 steel columns, including 47 massive core columns. After the initial explosions at the top, each building came down in a vertical, symmetrical collapse, which means that all 287 columns failed simultaneously. The official account of the World Trade Center is made absurd by these vertical collapses alone—but there are still more contradictory facts.

WTC 7 in Absolute Free Fall: Scientists and engineers in the 9/11 Truth Movement have long pointed out that WTC 7 accelerated downward at the rate of free-fall, or at least close to it. Prior to its final report on WTC 7, however, NIST had claimed that the time required for the building to collapse “was approximately 40 percent longer than the computed free fall time.” Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for NIST, even explained why the building could not have come down in free fall (assuming the truth of NIST’s non-demolition theory of the collapse): An object in free fall, he pointed out during a “technical briefing” on WTC 7 given in August 2008, “would be an object that has no structural components below it.” The top floor could not possibly have come down in free fall, in other words, because all the steel and concrete in the lower floors would have offered “structural resistance.”

In response, David Chandler, a high-school physics teacher, put a video on the internet showing that, for over two seconds, WTC 7 had come down in absolute (not merely virtual) free fall. In its final report, NIST acknowledged this fact, saying that for 2.25 seconds, the building descended “at gravitational acceleration.” Leaving no room for ambiguity, NIST said in an accompanying document that, for this 2.25-second period, the descent of WTC 7 was characterized by “gravitational acceleration (free fall).”

NIST acknowledged, therefore, that the top floor of the building, while coming straight down through a region that had, only seconds earlier, been occupied by steel-and-concrete floors supported by 82 steel columns, encountered zero resistance.

While acknowledging this empirical fact, however, NIST retained its previous theory, according to which the building had been brought down by fire, not explosives, incendiaries, or some combination thereof. But this theory, Sunder had previously explained, is inconsistent with free fall. In the final version of its report, accordingly, NIST removed the multiple assurances, which had been contained in its draft report, that its account of WTC 7’s collapse was “consistent with physical principles.” NIST implicitly acknowledged, in other words, that its WTC 7 report violated laws of physics.

In my 2009 book The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False, I emphasized that NIST, by admitting free fall—evidently in response to Chandler’s presentations—had contradicted Sunder’s statement, given in the August “technical briefing,” that free fall would have been impossible. How did NIST respond? By removing the video and transcript of that technical briefing from the internet.

Melted and Sulfidized Steel: Three professors in the Fire Protection Engineering Program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), studying a piece of steel recovered from WTC 7 and another piece from one of the Twin Towers, made a startling discovery, which a 2002 article in WPI’s magazine described thus:

A one-inch column has been reduced to half-inch thickness. Its edges—which are curled like a paper scroll—have been thinned to almost razor sharpness. Gaping holes—some larger than a silver dollar—let light shine through a formerly solid steel flange. This Swiss cheese appearance shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending—but not holes.

One reason for their shock had been stated earlier in the article: “[S]teel—which has a melting point of 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit—may weaken and bend, but does not melt during an ordinary office fire.” Another reason was that the steel, these professors wrote, had thinned as a result of sulfidation, after which they added: “No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified.”

A New York Times story referred to this discovery as “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.” The article by the three WPI professors, which was published as an appendix in the 2002 FEMA report on the World Trade Center, concluded by saying: “A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed.” But when NIST issued its 2005 report on the Twin Towers, it simply ignored this phenomenon. And then in 2008, when it issued its report on WTC 7, NIST again failed to mention this phenomenon. NIST thereby implicitly admitted that its theory, according to which fire was the only source of heat, could not account for this melted and sulfidized steel.

NIST could have easily accounted for this phenomenon, however, with the hypothesis that the steel had been melted by thermate, which is thermite—an incendiary—to which sulfur, which lowers the melting point of steel, has been added. Doing this, however, would have violated the government’s, and hence NIST’s, not-to-be-questioned assumption, according to which the three buildings came down solely because al-Qaeda hijackers had crashed airliners into two of them.

Metallic Particles in the WTC Dust: The WTC dust was found to contain metallic particles that can be explained—and evidently only explained—by the hypothesis that incendiaries and/or explosives were used. For example, the RJ Lee Group, which was hired by Deutsche Bank to prove to its insurance company that its building had been contaminated by dust from “the WTC Event,” reported that “iron and other metals were melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles.” The melting point of iron is 2,800°F, at least 1,000°F higher than the fires could have been. Scientists at the US Geological Survey, moreover, discovered that molybdenum had melted, even though its melting point is 4,753°F. As shown by these and other discoveries, the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings involved extremely high temperatures, which could not have been produced without incendiaries and/or explosives.

Nanothermite: A report by several scientists, including chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen, showed that the WTC dust also contained unreacted nanothermite, which—in distinction from ordinary thermite—is a high explosive. This nanothermite existed in the dust in the form of tiny red/gray chips. In calling the chips “unreacted nanothermite,” these scientists were pointing to the fact that the chips, besides having all the ingredients of nanothermite, exploded when touched with a flame. Asked whether this is “the smoking gun,” Harrit said it is better called “the ‘loaded gun,’ material that did not ignite for some reason.” In light of this discovery, the full significance of NIST’s admission that it did not examine the dust for thermite—which is a generic term, covering thermate and nanothermite as well as ordinary thermite—becomes apparent.

Testimonies about Explosions: Further evidence that explosives were used to bring down the buildings was provided by the testimonies, mentioned in Chapter 4, about explosions in the Twin Towers and WTC 7.

Al-Qaeda Theory Ruled Out: The overwhelming evidence that the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives, perhaps in conjunction with incendiaries, rules out the government’s al-Qaeda conspiracy theory, for three reasons. First, the fact that the buildings came straight down means that they were subjected to the type of controlled demolition known as “implosion,” which is “by far the trickiest type of explosive project,” which “only a handful of blasting companies in the world . . . possess enough experience . . . to perform.” Al-Qaeda would not have had the needed expertise.

Second, controlled demolition is relatively easy if a building can simply be knocked over sideways. The only reason to go to all the work required for bringing a tall building straight down is to avoid damaging nearby buildings. Had the 110-story Twin Towers fallen over sideways, they would have caused massive destruction in lower Manhattan, destroying dozens of other buildings and killing many thousands of people. Does anyone believe that, even if al-Qaeda operatives had had the expertise to make the buildings come straight down, they would have had the courtesy?

Third, foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours it would have taken to plant incendiaries and explosives. Only insiders could have done this.

To Conclude: Still further evidence against the official conspiracy theory, and thereby in favor of the alternative conspiracy theory, could be provided, including evidence against the government’s accounts of the damage to the Pentagon and the downing of United Flight 93. What has been presented above, however, is more than enough to show the falsity of Sunstein’s twofold claim that the 9/11 Truth Movement’s conspiracy theory is unjustified, because its evidence is “weak or even nonexistent,” whereas the government’s conspiracy theory, according to which al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, is “a justified and true conspiracy theory.” As we have seen, the exact opposite is the case.

Sunstein also made the following claim:

Conspiracy theories often display the characteristic features of a “degenerating research program” in which contrary evidence is explained away by adding epicycles and resisting falsification of key tenets.

As Sunstein’s footnote to this passage indicates, the concept of a “degenerating research program” was formulated in 1970 by philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, whose distinction between “degenerating” and “progressive” research programs has become influential in philosophy-of-science circles.

In a progressive research program, the theory on which the program is based becomes progressively confirmed, as each theory-inspired discovery leads to still further discoveries. In a degenerating program, by contrast, the advocates, rather than being led to new confirming evidence, are forced to defend the original theory by explaining away apparently disconfirming evidence—in ways analogous to the addition of epicycles to save the geocentric theory of the universe—and by simply refusing to admit that any evidence, no matter how damning, has falsified the theory.

Although Sunstein’s paragraph introducing this notion of degenerating research programs speaks simply of “conspiracy theories,” he clearly means it to apply to the 9/11 conspiracy theory in particular, given the fact that it is his “main focus” and “running example.” And it does, in fact, apply to it. But not to the conspiracy theory of the 9/11 Truth Movement, which has proven to be a remarkably fruitful and hence progressive research program, as shown by the above summary of evidence and the growing number of professional 9/11 organizations, listed in the previous chapter, that have adopted this theory. Moreover, the very fact that Sunstein felt a need to write this essay, providing a proposal for undermining the movement, suggests his awareness that its “research program” is progressing, not degenerating.

It is, instead, the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory that has turned out to be the degenerating research program. Besides the fact that the Bush–Cheney conspiracy theory has not led to the discovery of any new (true) facts about 9/11, its defenders have used two of the standard methods by which degenerating programs resist admitting that their theory has been falsified by contrary evidence: (1) changing the story, and (2) simply refusing to admit that any of the disconfirming evidence does, in fact, falsify their theory.

Analogously to adding epicycles, creators and defenders of the official account of 9/11 have often, in the face of evidence contradicting some particular story within the overall account, added new elements to, or otherwise changed, this story. Here are some examples:

Did Atta Drink Vodka at Shuckums on September 7? The day after the 9/11 attacks, the Associated Press published a story based on an interview with Tony Amos, the manager of a bar in Hollywood, Florida, called “Shuckums.” Reporting that Amos, having been shown photos of two men, had identified the one signed “Mohamed,” this story continued:

Amos said the two men had each consumed several drinks Friday night [September 7] and had given the bartender a hard time. . . . “The guy Mohamed was drunk, his voice was slurred and he had a thick accent,” Amos said. Bartender Patricia Idrissi said the men argued over the bill.

The next day, the St. Petersburg Times wrote:

Tony Amos, the night manager at Shuckums Bar in Hollywood, told the Palm Beach Post that Atta argued with him over his tab. . . .”They were wasted,” said [bartender Patricia] Idrissi, who said she directed the two men to a Chinese restaurant a few doors down. They later returned and each ordered about five drinks, she said.

That same day, September 13, a New York Times story said:

Patricia Idrissi would not have noticed [Mohamed Atta] except that he drank Stolichnaya vodka for three hours . . . and then seemed not to want to pay his $48 bar tab.

Three days later, Scotland’s Sunday Herald gave an account in which Atta used colorful language:

Last Friday Atta . . . and two other Middle Eastern men were spotted at a bar in Hollywood in Florida called Shuckums. They ran up a bill and started rowing with waitress Patricia Idrissi over the cost of their vodkas and rums. Atta shouted at the manager: “You think I can’t pay? I’m a pilot for American Airlines. I can pay my f***ing bill.”

A week later, Newsweek gave a still more startling account, saying:

Last week Atta and two of his buddies seem to have gone out for a farewell bender at a seafood bar called Shuckums. Atta drank five Stoli-and-fruit-juices, while one of the others drank rum and Coke. . . . Atta and his friends became agitated, shouting curse words in Arabic, reportedly including a particularly blasphemous one that roughly translates as “F—k God.”

This story was in considerable tension with Newsweek’s characterization of the hijackers as “a small band of religious zealots,” and especially in tension with the idea that Atta, the ringleader, was a devout Muslim—an idea the 9/11 Commission would later make canonical by saying that Atta had become very religious, even “fanatically so.”

This tension was gradually overcome by means of mutations in the Shuckums story. On September 16, the Washington Post wrote:

Atta played video Trivial Pursuit and blackjack with great determination. . . . Al-Shehhi and the other man had about five drinks each, [manager Tony Amos] said. . . . “Al-Shehhi was definitely upset,” Amos said. The bartender feared that Al-Shehhi might leave without paying his $48 tab. The manager intervened, asking if there was a problem. Al-Shehhi, glaring, . . . said: “There is no money issue. I am an airline pilot.”

The following week, the Post contained a still more cleaned-up version, which said:

Atta played video games, a pursuit out of line with fundamentalist beliefs. But the manager on duty that night has said that he doesn’t recall seeing Atta drink alcohol.

Atta, of course, had to drink something. This detail was provided in a Los Angeles Times story on September 27, which said:

[Shuckums’] owner, Tony Amos, says Atta sat quietly by himself and drank cranberry juice and played a video game, while Al-Shehhi and the other customer tossed back mixed drinks and argued.

The same week, Time magazine—which had earlier run the version of the Shuckums story in which Atta, having had five vodka-and-orange-juice drinks, was “wasted” —carried the new version, writing:

Atta, Al-Shehhi and another man visited Shuckums . . . Contrary to earlier reports of his carousing, Atta was the only one of the three who didn’t drink alcohol. Instead, he downed cranberry juice all night, sugary fuel for the pinball machine . . . that he played for 3 1/2 hours.

Finally, the 9/11 Commission—perhaps feeling uncomfortable about having the “fanatically religious” Atta at a bar, even if he was only drinking cranberry juice—eliminated the September 7 evening at Shuckums altogether. Describing Atta’s activities during the week before the attacks, it wrote:

Atta was still busy coordinating the teams. On September 7, he flew from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore, presumably to meet with the Flight 77 team in Laurel. On September 9, he flew from Baltimore to Boston.

The Commission’s Mohamad Atta was clearly all business.

Incriminating Evidence in Atta’s Luggage: Some of the strongest evidence of al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks was reportedly found in luggage discovered at the airport in Boston after the attacks. This luggage, with Atta’s name on it, reportedly contained various incriminating materials, including Atta’s last will and testament and a letter about preparing for the mission that was identical to letters reportedly found at the crash site of United Flight 93 and in an automobile rented by one of the hijackers and left at Dulles Airport, thereby connecting the hijackers on three of the flights.

Why was this luggage at the airport? Because, we were told, Atta had taken a commuter flight down from Portland, Maine, that morning in order to catch American Flight 11, and although he made the connection, his luggage did not.

But why was Atta in Portland? Because, although he was already in Boston on September 10, he and Abdullah al-Omari (another member of al-Qaeda) had rented a silver-blue Nissan and driven up to Portland.

This story seemed to make no sense. Why would Atta have been planning to take his will on a plane that he was going to fly into the World Trade Center? And why would Atta have gone up to Portland and stayed overnight? Besides being the ringleader for the operation, he was going to pilot Flight 11. If the commuter flight had been late, he would have been forced to cancel the whole operation, which he had been planning for years. The 9/11 Commission admitted that it could not explain why he would have made this trip.

The story makes no sense because it was a poorly thought-out substitute for the original story, which was that the incriminating material had been found in a white Mitsubishi, which Atta had rented and left in the parking lot at Boston’s Logan Airport. According to this story, which was broadcast on September 12 and 13, the hijackers who drove the Nissan to Portland and then took the commuter flight back to Boston were Adnan and Ameer Bukhari.

On the afternoon of the 13th, however, a problem emerged: It was discovered that neither of the Bukharis had died on 9/11: Ameer had died the year before and Adnan was still alive. So the story had to be changed. An Associated Press article on September 14 reported that the Nissan had been driven to Portland by Atta and his companion, but the incriminating materials were still said to have been found in a rented car in the Boston airport, although now it had been rented by “additional suspects,” not Atta. The final form of the story evidently first appeared on September 16 in a Washington Post story, which said:

Mohamed Atta. . . is thought to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11, the first to slam into the World Trade Center. A letter written by Atta, left in his luggage at Boston’s Logan Airport, said he planned to kill himself so he could go to heaven as a martyr. It also contained a Saudi passport, an international driver’s license, instructional videos for flying Boeing airliners and an Islamic prayer schedule. Officials believe that Atta and Alomari rented a car in Boston, drove to Portland, Maine, and took a room Monday night at the Comfort Inn . . . . They then flew on a short flight Tuesday morning from Portland to Boston, changing to Flight 11.

By October 5, the FBI had supplied a complete chronology of Atta and al-Omari’s activities in Portland, complete with videotape evidence of their presence at a Walmart, two ATMs, and the Portland Jetport. The FBI at some point even provided an affidavit, dated September 12, stating that the Nissan found at the Portland Jetport had been rented by Mohamed Atta, and that “American Airlines personnel at Logan discovered two bags [checked to passenger Atta] that had been bound for transfer to AA11 but had not been loaded onto the flight.”

Were the FBI agent and the judge who signed this affidavit on September 12 aided by a precognitive vision, in which they saw the story that would emerge only several days later? In any case, the authorities had successfully replaced a story that was contradicted by empirical facts by a story that was merely incoherent.

Flight Manifests with Alleged Hijackers’ Names: As mentioned above, the passenger manifests for the four 9/11 flights did not contain the names of the alleged hijackers, even though they had supposedly purchased tickets. In 2004 or 2005, this problem was seemingly overcome by the appearance of passenger manifests that do contain the names of the 19 men.

There are three problems with these manifests, however, which suggest that they are late fabrications. One problem is the very fact that they did not show up until several years later, after their absence had been noted by the 9/11 Truth Movement. A second problem is the fact that the FBI did not include them in the evidence it presented to the Moussaoui trial, although it surely could have included them if it had considered them authentic. A third problem is that these purported manifests included names of men who had not been identified as hijackers until some days after 9/11. The manifest for American Flight 11, for example, contains the names of Waleed and Wail al-Shehri, even though these brothers were replacements for the Bukhari brothers, who, as we saw above, were not removed from the list until September 13. So these could not be the passenger manifests issued on September 11.

Getting Rid of Impossible Cell Phone Calls: According to news reports during the first few years after 9/11, as we saw earlier, there were said to have been many cell phone calls from the airliners, with about ten such calls from United 93 alone. Some of those calls were reported by Deena Burnett, about whom the FBI’s report says: “Burnett was able to determine that her husband was using his own cellular telephone because the caller identification showed his number.” These calls came, however, when Flight 93’s altitude would have been between 34,300 and 40,700 feet. As we saw earlier, scientist A. K. Dewdney demonstrated in 2003 that cell phone calls at this height would have been impossible in 2001. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the FBI changed the story.

This change was evidently made in 2004, as illustrated by a new account of a 12-minute phone call reportedly made by American 11 flight attendant Amy Sweeney to Michael Woodward, the manager of the American Flight Services Office in Boston. An affidavit from the FBI agent who interviewed Woodward that same day stated that, according to Woodward, Sweeney had been “using a cellular telephone.” This affidavit had, moreover, become public knowledge through an Associated Press story of October 2001, which said:

An American Airlines employee received a cell phone call from a flight attendant aboard doomed Flight 11 shortly before it crashed into the World Trade Center, according to newly unsealed court documents. . . . The FBI cited its interview with the American Airlines employee in an affidavit.

But when the 9/11 Commission discussed this call in its report, which appeared in July 2004, it declared, in a note at the back of the book, that Sweeney had used an onboard phone.

Behind that change was an implausible new story told by the FBI earlier in 2004: Woodward, not having a tape recorder in his office, had repeated Sweeney’s call verbatim to Nancy Wyatt, a colleague in his office, who had in turn repeated it to another colleague at American headquarters in Dallas, who had recorded it. This recording, which was discovered only in 2004, indicated that Sweeney had used a passenger-seat phone, thanks to “an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant.”

This new story is implausible for many reasons: First, if this relayed recording had really been made on 9/11, we cannot believe that Woodward would have failed to mention it to the FBI agent who interviewed him later that same day. While the agent was taking notes, Woodward would surely have said: “You don’t need to rely on my memory, because there is a recording of a word-for-word repetition of Sweeney’s statements down in Dallas.” Second, if Woodward had repeated Sweeney’s statement that she had used “an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant,” he would not have told the FBI agent later that same day that she had been “using a cellular telephone.” Third, a Los Angeles Times story of September 20, 2001, said this about the Sweeney-to-Woodward call:

FBI officials in Dallas, where American Airlines is based, were able, on the day of the terrorist attacks, to piece together a partial transcript and an account of the phone call.

If officials at AA headquarters had a recording of Nancy Wyatt’s virtually verbatim account of Michael Woodward’s virtually verbatim account of what Amy Sweeney had said, FBI officials in Dallas would not have needed to “piece together a partial transcript.” For these reasons, we can only conclude that the FBI invented this story in order to get rid of the 12-minute cell phone call in the original story.

In any case, this new story about the Amy Sweeney call was evidently merely one part of a general change in the FBI’s position, through which it no longer affirmed high-altitude cell phone calls. Although this change was evidently made by 2004, it became somewhat widely known only after the Moussaoui trial of 2006, at which the FBI presented evidence about the phone calls from the four airliners. During the trial, an FBI spokesman said: “13 of the terrified passengers and crew members made 35 air phone calls and two cell phone calls.” As this statement shows, of the 10 to 12 calls that had been reported by their recipients to have been cell phone calls, only two were now thus identified by the FBI. These were two calls reportedly made at 9:58am, when the plane had descended to 5,000 feet. Moreover, as the FBI’s report available on the internet shows, the only cell phone calls now affirmed by the FBI for the four airliners combined are these two low-altitude calls from United 93. The FBI was no longer affirming any technologically impossible high-altitude cell phone calls.

While getting rid of that problem, however, the FBI created a new one: How to explain why so many people had believed that they had been called on cell phones. In particular, if Tom Burnett had actually used a seat-back phone, as the FBI’s report now says, why did Deena Burnett see his cell phone number on her Caller ID? The official defenders of the government’s conspiracy theory have offered no answer to this question. And for good reason: There is no possible answer except to admit that these calls had been faked, in one way or another. So the question is simply ignored.

Getting Rid of the Impossible Barbara Olson Calls: As we saw earlier, Ted Olson claimed that he had received two calls from his wife, Barbara Olson, who had reportedly been on American Flight 77. This claim became part of the official story: Referring to four “connected calls to unknown numbers” that had been made from this flight, the 9/11 Commission, writing in 2004, said: “[T]he FBI and DOJ believe that all four represent communications between Barbara Olson and her husband’s office.” In 2006, however, after the fact that Flight 77 had no onboard phones had become known, the FBI’s report said that Barbara Olson “attempted” one call, that it was “unconnected,” and that it (therefore) lasted “0 seconds.” This is quite a change from Ted Olson’s claim, according to which he had received two calls from his wife, with the first one lasting “about one (1) minute,” and the second one lasting “two or three or four minutes.”

Al-Suqami’s Passport Discovered—Revised Version: As we saw above, credulity was severely strained by the FBI’s claim that it had discovered the passport of Satam al-Suqami on the street after the collapse of the North Tower. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission was discussing this alleged discovery, the story had been modified to say that “a passer-by picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed.” So, rather than needing to survive the collapse of the North Tower, the passport now merely needed to escape from al-Suqami’s pocket or luggage, escape from the plane’s cabin, avoid being destroyed or even singed by the instantaneous jet-fuel fire, and then escape from the building so that it could fall to the ground. This modification did little if anything to make the story more credible.

Cheney to the PEOC—Revised Timeline: As we saw earlier, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, during open testimony to the 9/11 Commission, reported an exchange in the PEOC under the White House during which Vice President Cheney seemed to confirm a previously given stand-down order. The 9/11 Commission’s damage-control revisions involved the following elements:

—First, whereas Mineta had described a conversation that occurred before the Pentagon was struck—at about 9:25 or 9:26, he estimated—the 9/11 Commission claimed that Cheney did not even enter the underground corridor leading to the PEOC until 9:37, after which he paused in the corridor to telephone President Bush, at which time Cheney learned about the strike on the Pentagon (which reportedly occurred at 9:38) and “saw television coverage of the smoke coming from the building.”

—Second, the Commission said that Cheney did not enter the PEOC itself until almost 10:00, “perhaps at 9:58.”

—Third, Mineta’s testimony about the exchange between Cheney and the young man was simply not mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report, and the video of Mineta’s giving this testimony was removed from the 9/11 Commission’s video archive.

—Fourth, that exchange, in which the young man told Cheney about an incoming plane and repeatedly asked what should be done, was replaced by a story about an exchange that occurred later: “At 10:02, the communicators in the shelter began receiving reports from the Secret Service of an inbound aircraft. . . . At some time between 10:10 and 10:15, a military aide told the Vice President and others that the aircraft was 80 miles out. Vice President Cheney was asked for authority to engage the aircraft. . . . The Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane. . . . The military aide returned a few minutes later, probably between 10:12 and 10:18, and said the aircraft was 60 miles out. He again asked for authorization to engage. The Vice President again said yes.

According to this new story, the order was for the military to engage, not to stand-down. And the exchange occurred not only after the Pentagon had been struck but also after United 93 had crashed, which occurred a few minutes after 10:00. Having the exchange come after this crash was important because of multiple reports that United 93 was shot down and that this had occurred after Cheney—at about 9:45, according to counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke—had issued shootdown authorization.

The new story, therefore, got Cheney off the hook for both the Pentagon strike and the crash of United 93: Not having arrived in the PEOC, where he took charge of the administration’s response to the attacks, until long after the Pentagon was struck, he could not have confirmed a stand-down order while he was there. And, not having given the shoot-down authorization until about 10:15, he could not have authorized a shoot-down order for United 93.

The only problem with the new story was that it contradicted an enormous amount of testimony, including that of David Bohrer (his photographer), Condoleezza Rice, and Richard Clarke (in addition to that of Mineta). It even contradicted testimony of Cheney himself, who told Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press five days after 9/11:

[A]fter I talked to the president [from my office] . . . I went down into . . . the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. . . . [W]hen I arrived there within a short order, we had word the Pentagon’s been hit.

Cheney himself, therefore, said that he had entered the PEOC prior to the Pentagon attack, not 20 minutes afterwards, as the 9/11 Commission would claim. For all these reasons, we can safely conclude that the Commission’s new timeline for Dick Cheney was false.

Why the Airliners Were Not Intercepted—The New Official Story: Aside from its revision of the Cheney timeline, the 9/11 Commission’s most important revision, and the one to which it devoted the most space, was its creation of a new explanation of why the hijacked airliners had not been intercepted. According to the first explanation, as we saw earlier, the FAA had notified the military about the troubles being experienced by all four airliners, but not in time for the military to make the interceptions. Between 2001 and 2004, however, the 9/11 Truth Movement showed convincingly that, even if the FAA had been as tardy as the military claimed, the airliners should still have been intercepted; I summarized these arguments in The New Pearl Harbor. 9/11 Commission co-chairs Kean and Hamilton even agreed, writing in their 2006 “inside story” book:

[I]f the military had had the amount of time they said they had . . . and had scrambled their jets, it was hard to figure how they had failed to shoot down at least one of the planes.

As this statement implies, the military had given false testimony, according to Kean and Hamilton, saying that they had had more time than they really did. And this allegedly false information, for which the military and the FAA shared responsibility, “created the opportunity for people to construct a series of conspiracy theories that persist to this day.” At the core of these false conspiracy theories, Kean and Hamilton said, was “the notion that the military . . . had issued a ‘stand down’ order on 9/11, thus permitting the attacks to occur.”

The antidote for this conspiracy theory, they said, is the new, improved timeline, which was provided in The 9/11 Commission Report. According to this new timeline, the FAA notified the military about American Flight 11 at about when they had said (which did not, the 9/11 Commission insists, provide time for an interception), but the FAA did not notify the military about Flights 175, 77, and 93 until after they had crashed—which explains why the military did not intercept them.

This would, of course, provide an excellent explanation—if it were true. But there are many reasons to believe that it is not. Take American Flight 77, about which the military had, according to the old story, been notified at 9:24. The new story says that the FAA did not notify the military until 9:34 (four minutes before the Pentagon was struck), and even then said only that Flight 77 was lost, not that it had been hijacked.

This new story is contradicted by an enormous amount of evidence, one piece of which is an FAA memo that was read into the 9/11 Commission’s record and then ignored. This memo, written before the military had challenged the 9:24 notification time, said that this time was far too late, because it was only the formal notification time: “before the formal notification,” this memo said, “information about [American Flight 77] was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges.” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, after reading this memo into the record, emphasized its main point: that the military had been advised of Flight 77’s troubles “substantially earlier than the formal notification of hijacking.” When the 9/11 Commission issued its report, however, it said that the FAA, far from having notified the military about Flight 77’s hijacking before 9:24, did not notify it at all: “[The military] never received notice that American 77 was hijacked.”

For this and many other reasons, which I have laid out at considerable length elsewhere, the 9/11 Commission’s new explanation for the failures to intercept, like its other new stories, appears to have been a lie.

Besides rewriting history to erase disconfirming stories from the record, the defenders of the official conspiracy theory have repeatedly refused to admit that a large body of evidence contradicting their theory has already, in fact, falsified it. This body of evidence, which the government has not sought to deny or explain away, includes the following facts:

—The FBI’s page on Osama bin Laden as a “Most Wanted Terrorist” does not name him as wanted for 9/11, because, an official spokesman admitted, “the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” The White House has not explained why, if it has hard evidence, the FBI evidently does not know about it.

—The idea that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by “radical Islam” is further contradicted by the fact that the behavior of at least many of the alleged hijackers showed them to be anything but devout Muslims. The government has not explained why an attack carried out (allegedly) by men who drank, took cocaine, and hired lap dancers and prostitutes could be portrayed as an attack by representatives of Islam.

—None of the eight pilots squawked the hijack code, even though there would have been more than enough time. The government has given no explanation as to why these pilots would not have performed this quick and simple act, if indeed men were trying to break into the cockpits.

—Ted Olson’s claim that he was called twice by his wife, Barbara Olson, from American Flight 77 is not supported by the FBI’s report on phone calls from this plane. No explanation of this contradiction has been offered.

—The FBI report on phone calls from United Flight 93 now says that Tom Burnett used a seat-back phone to call his wife, Deena Burnett, although she had reported seeing his cell phone number on her telephone’s Caller ID. There has been no explanation of this contradiction.

—There has also been no explanation as to why the al-Qaeda hijackers were wearing red headbands if, as former CIA officer Milt Bearden says, these are worn by Shi’a, but not Sunni, Muslims.

—Another mystery unexplained is how Hani Hanjour, known to be incapable of safely flying a single-engine plane, could have flown a Boeing 757 through a trajectory declared by some experienced 757 pilots to be too difficult even for them. (The authors of the Popular Mechanics book about 9/11 volunteered a solution to this mystery, saying that Hanjour flew most of the route on autopilot, “steer[ing] the plane manually for only the final eight minutes of the flight.” It was precisely during this period, however, when he reportedly performed the trajectory.

—The government has never explained why the Secret Service allowed the president to remain at the school in Florida for 30 minutes after the second attack on the World Trade Center, which was reportedly taken as evidence that terrorists in hijacked airliners were going after high-value targets. The White House, as we saw, did try to claim that Bush had left the classroom more quickly than he actually did, but there has been no attempt to claim that he left the school earlier—even though the fact that the Secret Service allowed him to remain there seemed to falsify the claim that it knew unknown terrorists were using hijacked airliners to strike high-value targets. As Philip Melanson, the author of a book about the Secret Service, said in 2004: “[T]he procedure should have been to get the president to the closest secure location as quickly as possible.”

—With regard to the time at which Vice-President Cheney reached the PEOC, there has been no attempt to explain the contradiction between the 9/11 Commission’s claim, according to which he did not get there until almost 10:00am, and the testimony of Norman Mineta and even Cheney himself (on Meet the Press five days after 9/11), according to which he arrived there before the attack on the Pentagon.

—There has been no attempt to explain why, if explosives did not bring the Twin Towers down, over 100 members of the Fire Department of New York reported explosions going off in the buildings before and during their collapses.

Accordingly, while Sunstein correctly says that degenerating research programs are typically guilty of “resisting falsification of key tenets,” it is, contrary to his suggestion, the defenders of the Bush–Cheney conspiracy theory, rather than the leaders of the 911 Truth Movement, who have manifested this behavior.

Sunstein’ fifth thesis, if taken in the sense that most readers would understand it, is clearly false. It is so obviously false that Sunstein, being a highly respected law professor who has taught at both Chicago and Harvard, surely could not have meant it to be understood in that sense—that is, as referring to the 9/11 Truth Movement. He would surely not have written an article concerning a movement about which he was ill-informed. Therefore, being well-informed about the 9/11 Truth Movement, he would have known (1) that its conspiracy theory is not demonstrably false, not unjustified because devoid of evidence, and not an example of a degenerating research program, and (2) that the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory does exemplify these characteristics.

If we accept the idea that Sunstein’s essay contained an esoteric message, we can see it as pointing towards this twofold truth by omission: Sunstein must have been aware of a good deal of the evidence provided by the 9/11 Truth Movement against the government’s theory, and thereby for its own theory. And yet he made no attempt to refute this evidence. Did he not thereby provide a hint that this evidence was irrefutable?

We can, therefore, see Sunstein’s fifth thesis as a clever way to get across this twofold point. That is, by virtue of having a good understanding of human psychology, Sunstein would have known that, by writing an article that stated the exact opposite of the truth, he would stimulate members of the 9/11 Truth Movement to spell out, more explicitly than they had before, the fact that the Bush–Cheney administration’s 9/11 conspiracy theory is trebly in trouble, because:

—It is unjustified, not being supported by any evidence that can withstand scrutiny.

—It is demonstrably false and has, in fact, been demonstrated to be false.

—It has long been the basis for a degenerating research program, which can seem unfalsified to much of the public only because its proponents—who include much of the mainstream press—have revised disproven elements of it or, when this was impossible, simply refused to acknowledge the falsification.