If you wanted conspiracy theories to flourish after the 9/11 attacks, here s what you'd do: suppress video evidence of the attacks themselves, ship the rubble from the attacks overseas immediately without looking at it, call everyone who disputed the official narrative crazy, and engage in a campaign of lies about the attacks.
00:03:15.380The circumstances around Building 7's collapse and the near total absence of an explanation for why it collapsed provoked, in the end, a Senate investigation.
00:03:26.480Again, I don't know that you can find structural engineers that would say that that thing didn't come down in any other way than a controlled demolition.
00:03:33.820Building 7 had a pretty amazing list of tenants.
00:03:36.420They included, ironically, the New York City Office of Emergency Management.
00:03:40.800That would be the agency responsible for responding to the 9-11 attacks.
00:03:44.760On the 9th and 10th floors of Building 7 were the New York Field Office of the United States Secret Service.
00:03:50.540The equipment and records they kept there were destroyed that day when the building collapsed.
00:03:54.740The building's 25th floor was home to a secret CIA office.
00:05:56.780And I have asked some people who have been doing some of the rescue and recovery work this morning.
00:06:01.440If you look behind me, you can see the very remains, the skeletal remains of the World Trade Center.
00:06:07.080And one volunteer, Robert Gerlinski, explained to me the reason there's so little rubble is that all of it simply fell down into the ground and was pulverized, evaporated.
00:06:19.100Now, I should say, though, for the last several hours, there's been a steady stream of dump trucks and other very large vehicles carrying out debris.
00:06:27.960According to a New York Times article published five months after the attacks, quote,
00:06:32.700an unknown number of steel columns has been sent off to mills as far away as Asia without ever having been examined or saved.
00:06:39.760This made it nearly impossible for engineers to answer the monumental questions of exactly why and how the buildings,
00:06:47.240designed to sustain a jet impact, completely collapsed.
00:06:51.140To the extent that any analysis of the debris was done at all, it was done by volunteers at a scrapyard in Jersey City, New Jersey.
00:06:59.220According to the New York Times, the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation involves extremely thin bits of steel collected from the trade towers
00:07:07.640and from Seven World Trade Center, a 47-story high-rise that also collapsed for unknown reasons.
00:07:14.200The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright.
00:07:22.860Two agencies investigated the collapse.
00:07:25.460One was FEMA, which relied on volunteers, and the other was NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, funded by Congress.
00:07:33.760FEMA's explanation is that falling debris from the North Tower damaged the outer facade of Building 7 and started a series of fires in the lower floors.
00:07:42.060According to NIST, the collapse of the towers in the morning had damaged water mains, so the building's sprinkler systems failed.
00:07:48.720Since the building had been evacuated earlier in the morning and the fire department's resources were stretched to a breaking point by ongoing search and rescue missions,
00:07:56.320fire chiefs made the decision early on not to fight the fires that were burning in Building 7.
00:08:01.760According to the NIST report, thermal expansion of steel beams, not the complete melting of steel,
00:08:07.500caused the connections tying a crucial girder, girder 2001A, to column 79, and that joint failed.
00:08:15.640The girder walked six and a quarter inches off its seat, and that precipitated what is known as a progressive collapse.
00:08:22.000That means that the collapse started in one area and then spread downward due to gravity through the rest of the building.
00:08:28.680There are two questions that come to mind, and both are obvious.
00:08:30.940First, if there was just one failure point, then why does video evidence show the building coming down symmetrically, all at once, at free-fall acceleration,
00:08:40.500in what more closely resembles what's called a global collapse, where all the supporting columns are severed simultaneously?
00:08:46.640The second question is, how have other steel frame buildings around the world, similar in design to that in Tower 7, fared during fires?
00:08:54.800In 1991, for example, the 38-story One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia had an eight-floor fire that burned for 18 hours, and yet the building didn't collapse.
00:09:06.040In 1988, the 62-story first interstate bank building in Los Angeles had a massive fire that started on the 12th floor.
00:09:15.660In 2017, the 24-story Grenfell Tower in London burned for over 24 hours, and yet the internal steel was stood the fire.
00:09:26.020So why then did Building 7 collapse after just seven hours of burning, in a way that no steel frame building anywhere in the world has ever collapsed?
00:09:35.620With the support of a group called Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, Professor Leroy Hulsey of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks conducted an independent study whose findings were released in 2020.
00:09:50.380Professor Hulsey found that office fires of the kind in Building 7 on 9-11 could not have produced sufficient thermal expansion to cause the crucial girder to fail.
00:10:01.320And more significantly, he and his team found that NIST's explanation does not account for what anyone can see on video, which is that the entire building came down all at once.
00:10:12.700Not in a progressive collapse, but in a total collapse.
00:10:16.160Something else, therefore, must have triggered the downfall.
00:10:19.920There is only one thing that could have triggered a collapse like the one we saw on television, and that is a controlled demolition.
00:10:27.220Our ability to analyze the collapse is limited by the video that we have.
00:10:31.260We don't have footage of the south side of the building, where the fires were, because the cameras there were likely destroyed or obstructed by the collapse of the Twin Towers.
00:10:39.060One issue with the controlled demolition hypothesis is that the widely circulated video of the building coming down is selectively edited.
00:10:46.020In fact, the building did not exactly collapse all at once.
00:10:51.720What you're seeing now is the full video of the collapse.
00:10:54.180It shows the penthouse collapsing first, and then very quickly, the rest of the building going.
00:11:00.280The unedited video leaves more questions than it answers.
00:11:04.280It calls into question the official NIST narrative, but it doesn't conclusively show a controlled demolition either.
00:11:10.500Because of how quickly authorities shipped the rubble overseas, we did not get a thorough investigation into the destruction.
00:11:15.920But one group of scientists did collect and test four samples of dust and debris collected by a Manhattan resident about 10 minutes after the collapse of the Second World Trade Center tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.
00:11:29.480In 2009, they published the results of their study in the Open Chemical Physics Journal.
00:11:33.900In those samples, the scientists found distinctive red-gray chips full of highly energetic and thermitic material.
00:11:43.060In other words, they found traces of explosive compounds.
00:11:46.640To its credit, NIST's report did investigate multiple hypothetical blast scenarios, but found it would be impossible to carry out on any floor in the building without detection.
00:11:56.520That would have required removing or cutting columns with welding torches and placing wires for demolition.
00:12:02.860NIST found that window breakage patterns on visible floors was not at all like expected from a blast.
00:12:09.260NIST did not test residue from the attacks for thermite, but did note that thermite burns slowly relative to explosive materials,
00:12:16.620and would require several minutes in contact with a massive steel section to heat it to a temperature that would result in substantial weakening.
00:12:23.860Additionally, they estimated that at least 0.13 pounds of thermite would be required to heat each pound of steel section to approximately 700 degrees Celsius,
00:12:34.440the temperature at which steel weakens substantially.
00:12:37.120Which means that if Building 7 were demolished using thermite, many thousands of pounds of thermite would need to have been placed inconspicuously ahead of time,
00:12:45.660remotely ignited, and somehow held in direct contact with the surface of hundreds of massive structural components to weaken the building,
00:12:52.340making it an unlikely substance for achieving a controlled demolition.
00:12:57.740NIST also says that an explosion big enough to take down the building would have been considerably louder than any noises recorded around the time the building collapsed.
00:13:06.220Yet, eyewitness accounts say they did hear explosions inside the building.
00:13:10.320All this time, I'm hearing all types of explosions.
00:13:15.800All this time, I'm hearing explosions.
00:13:17.320We attempted to interview that witness. His name was Barry Jennings, but he died at the untimely age of 53, just two days before NIST released its report on Tower 7.
00:13:28.380The film director Spike Lee attempted to cover this story in an HBO docu-series entitled NYC Epicenters 9-11 to 2021.5.
00:13:36.780In an interview with the New York Times, Lee said the amount of heat that it takes to make steel melt, that temperature is not reached.
00:13:44.040And then the juxtaposition of the way that Building 7 fell to the ground, when you put it next to other building collapses that were demolitions, it's like you're looking at the same thing.
00:13:53.500For saying this, Lee was excoriated by the press, which usually lionizes him.
00:13:57.960He suggested that the official 9-11 narrative might be wrong, and for doing so, he was called an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist by the Times of Israel.
00:14:07.780In the end, Lee re-edited his docu-series and removed portions that were skeptical of the official story of the collapse of Building 7.
00:14:16.020Where do you keep your most valuable possessions?
00:14:19.140Not your necktie or a pair of socks, but things you wouldn't want to replace or maybe couldn't.
00:14:24.200Heirlooms from your parents, your birth certificate, your firearms, your grandfather's shotgun.
00:22:46.580Under the 1947 act that created NSA, we don't have to share that with anyone and we're not going to.
00:22:53.420But somehow the Israelis and the Saudis always were able to find out something was there that they wanted.
00:23:02.140And so when we refused, they'd call the White House, the White House had called the DCI and the DCI would say, give it to them.
00:23:10.140We know very little about NSA's foreknowledge of 9-11 because the 9-11 Commission barely investigated it.
00:23:16.740Keep in mind, the NSA is the largest American intel agency by far.
00:23:20.860And yet the Commission never assigned a staff member to research NSA files.
00:23:24.860In part because some of the 9-11 commissioners and staff simply did not understand what the NSA was and what it did.
00:23:31.380Even now, the NSA's terrorism archives still have never been thoroughly reviewed by outside investigators.
00:23:37.140If someone ever did go through those files, they'd likely find a treasure trove of previously undisclosed warnings about the 9-11 attacks.
00:23:43.740The NSA was the primary agency responsible for monitoring the switchboard through which Al-Qaeda operatives communicated with each other.
00:23:50.580It's certainly an absurdity for what the American people pay for signals intelligence to be collected, translated, and supplied to the intelligence community.
00:24:03.140To have the British, the Saudis, the Israelis getting information from our national security agency that we in the agency were not privileged enough to get.
00:24:16.860A number of foreign governments may have had foreknowledge of 9-11, but the Israeli government stands out in particular.
00:24:24.460On the morning of 9-11, a group of five Israeli nationals purported to have witnessed the initial explosion of the World Trade Center and were seen to be celebrating the event.
00:24:34.460At the time, the celebrations received quite a bit of mainstream media coverage.
00:24:38.060Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis, again, very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things they didn't tell us before September 11th.
00:24:49.060It's striking to see operatives from a supposedly allied country celebrating the mass murder of Americans.
00:24:54.660But it is true that some in Israel saw the attack as a good thing for them.
00:24:58.660A September 12, 2001 article in the New York Times quotes now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responding to the 9-11 attacks.
00:25:08.660Before adding, well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.
00:25:13.060Netanyahu predicted that the attack would strengthen the bond between our two peoples because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.
00:25:24.060According to FBI documents, the Israelis caught celebrating the 9-11 attacks had videotaped the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and may have possessed foreknowledge of the same.
00:25:35.260When the Israelis were arrested in New Jersey, they were carrying box cutters, multiple passports, thousands of dollars in cash, and photos of themselves smiling with the World Trade Center burning in the background.
00:25:47.260The Israelis are always for the Israelis first, last, always.
00:25:52.260They don't like the United States except, for the most part, our money.
00:25:58.260And yet, our National Security Agency is producing information for them but not shareable with its own people.
00:26:08.260According to FBI records, polygraph tests administered by the FBI suggested that they did not have foreknowledge of the attacks but did engage in deception and were likely involved in illegal foreign counterintelligence.
00:26:20.260They were spying in the United States.
00:26:21.260The leader of the group, a man called Dominic Souter, fled to Israel on or around September 14, 2001, immediately.
00:26:28.260And he was later included on an FBI anti-terror watch list distributed to European allies in May of 2002.
00:26:34.260Most of the Israelis were held in FBI detention for two and a half months before they were deported for visa violations, a common way to expel foreign intel assets from allied countries.
00:26:44.260The Israelis pride themselves on having infiltrated every Arab intelligence service, every terrorist group.
00:26:53.260Did the Israelis know about 9-11 and not tell us?
00:26:56.260One memorandum submitted to the 9-11 Commission presented substantial evidence suggesting that numerous art students from Israel, who were in fact Israeli intel assets, have been strategically located across the United States.
00:27:09.260It's hard not to notice that they lived near the future 9-11 hijackers.
00:27:13.260There were groups of Israelis traveling around the country as artists, sketching things.
00:27:20.260It happened to be one time around Cape Canaveral, I remember.
00:27:23.260And other places where there were certainly things to paint and sketch, but also noticeably near military installations or some other kind of installation in the government.
00:27:38.260So I think that's an open question yet.
00:27:41.260The so-called Israeli art students centered their operations in Hollywood, Florida and Northern New Jersey.
00:27:46.260Those are the exact locations of the hijackers before the attack.
00:27:52.260It is very difficult to believe, based on the existing evidence and the location of their common central operating bases, that this group was not tracking the future hijackers and their collaborators as well.
00:28:03.260According to The Forward, a Jewish publication, quote,
00:28:07.260The Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
00:28:13.260Within a week of the attack, Israeli intelligence officials claimed they warned the United States about large scale terror attacks on highly visible targets in the United States.
00:28:22.260But the specifics of those warnings have never been made public. There's no evidence they happened.
00:28:27.260In fact, in the whole time I worked in counterterrorism from 92 till 2004, I never saw one piece of information from the Israelis that was really worth anything.
00:28:41.260As Americans, we need Washington to create a new, truly independent commission, one that does not lie, and that instead investigates what happened on 9-11 and answers the questions we've posed in this episode.
00:28:53.260Who made the decision to ship the debris from the attacks out of this country immediately, and why?
00:28:59.260What was the role of the CIA office in Building 7?
00:29:03.260What signals intelligence did the NSA have in relation to the plot, and how much of it did they share with foreign governments?
00:29:10.260What did those foreign governments know and fail to tell the United States?
00:29:14.260The American public deserves answers immediately to those questions.
00:29:19.260These are all questions the 9-11 Commission itself ignored.
00:29:22.260Why did the FBI's most wanted poster for Osama Bin Laden, updated in November of 2001, omit any mention of the 9-11 attacks?
00:29:32.260Why did it take the government five years to release footage of the Pentagon?
00:29:37.260And why were there only two publicly available videos of the Pentagon crash?
00:29:41.260The Pentagon was one of the most heavily secured and surveilled buildings on planet Earth.
00:29:46.260And yet, even now, more than 20 years later, there are only two videos.
00:29:50.260Why did U.S. forces abruptly bury Osama Bin Laden at sea and never release any photograph of his body?
00:29:57.260How hard, by the way, would it be for amateur pilots with only basic aviation training and no experience flying jumbo jets to navigate to lower Manhattan and crash into a building?
00:30:09.260The majority of hijackers were flagged for additional screening at the airport.
00:30:13.260How did they get on those watch lists?
00:30:15.260And why didn't security slow them down?
00:30:18.260Why wasn't there substantial wreckage of Flight 93 at its supposed crash site in Shankville, Pennsylvania?
00:30:25.260We were told the crash of that aircraft was so powerful that it vaporized the aircraft's hull.
00:30:30.260And yet, the hijackers' passports were found intact at the site.
00:31:24.260We'll reveal who profited from 9-11 in the next installment of our series.
00:31:30.260Thank you for watching the 9-11 Files.
00:31:38.260The next episode drops next week, or you can unlock the entire five-part series right now, ad-free, by becoming a TCN member.
00:31:46.260Members also get access to the Watch Companion, a guide to the timeline, the key figures, the primary sources that we went to to bring you this documentary.