Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks at the National September 11 Memorial Museum opening, saying that in coming years, the museum "will take its place alongside the fields of Gettysburg, the waters of Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial."

THE 9/11 Memorial opened this week in New York City. By all accounts it’s a beautiful, sombre museum dedicated to those who lost their lives on the greatest act of terrorism perpetrated on US soil.

The events of September 11, 2001, are officially regarded as an al-Qaida plot. But conspiracy theorists have long tried to rewrite the official history. Some say Saudi Arabia was involved. The more extreme blame the US Government.

It’s one thing when 9/11 conspiracy theories bounce around the more colourful corners of cyberspace. But now, children are directly exposed to them through an illustrated kids’ book written right here in Australia.

Melbourne author Dee McLachlan, writing under the name “Dalia Mae Lachlan”, has penned a book called The 3 Tall Buildings.

It tells the story of how the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, plus its neighbour World Trade Centre Building 7 (WTC 7), crumbled “like a big magic trick”.

“September 11 was most likely a false flag operation, and whatever powers that be wanted to create an enemy for a war machine,” McLachlan says, explaining her motivation for the book.

McLachlan says the events of that day were so horrific, so graphic and so fundamentally shocking to the western soul, that we’ve falsely pinpointed a face of evil who must have been behind it.

“It is much, much easier for us to believe that some foreign mad people orchestrated this very, very complex attack,” she says. “It is much easier to withstand the trauma than accept the evidence that says this is not the case.”

McLachlan believes the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, and WTC 7, all toppled with the aid of explosives. WTC 7 is the focus of much of her book, as stated in the promotional blurb:

“The book is about how they huffed and puffed and pulled the baby building down.”

The baby building in question was WTC7, a comparatively small 47 storey tower dwarfed by its near neighbours. The official report found that intense fires eventually led to floors failing, columns buckling and complete collapse. 9/11 conspiracists say it was demolished in the sort of implosion you occasionally see on TV where old hotels or obsolete high-rises are destroyed.

The question is, why push the conspiratorial twist of events on young minds? The official version of events is hard enough to explain to the young (just ask this reporter, whose 7-year-old was born on September 11). Why not just tell a straight history and let kids grow old enough to process their own version later on?

“We have to work and think for ourselves as children or as adults,” McLachlan says. “We have got to look for where the truth might lie.

“Children have had rhymes about plagues and witches and all sorts of bad things. This book is the same. It’s a warning we need to think for ourselves.”

McLachlan is a film producer, director and writer and the parent of two teenagers. She says she wishes she didn’t have to write this book, but that she felt compelled to bring the truth behind 9/11 to light.

“I don’t want this stuff in my life. I would so prefer to be an artist who wants to make films, but the lies and deceit that I see plain in sight are so egregious that to be truthful to myself, I want to speak out,” she says.

“I honestly don’t want to do it, but for sake of my kids, I feel we have been drawn in by lies.”

The book is available online and is part of a five-pronged series billed as the “Awaken Your Kids” series. Big banks, guns, the advertising industry, and genetically modified crops are the subjects of the other four books.

Many people would relate to those four targets as topics worthy of critiquing for young minds. Most of us would agree the banks are bastards, for example. But the 9/11 book is different, as it completely rejects the widely-accepted version of events.

Anyway, if you’re curious, you can buy it here. Royalties will go to Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a loose collection of individuals whose work has been discredited by many of their peers.