This is a study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) — a 47-story building that suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, following the horrible events of that morning. The objective of the study was threefold: (1) Examine the structural response of WTC 7 to fire loads that may have occurred on September 11, 2001; (2) Rule out scenarios that could not have caused the observed collapse; and (3) Identify types of failures and their locations that may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed.

The UAF research team utilized three approaches for examining the structural response of WTC 7 to the conditions that may have occurred on September 11, 2001. First, we simulated the local structural response to fire loading that may have occurred below Floor 13, where most of the fires in WTC 7 are reported to have occurred. Second, we supplemented our own simulation by examining the collapse initiation hypothesis developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Third, we simulated a number of scenarios within the overall structural system in order to determine what types of local failures and their locations may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed.

The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.

About two weeks ago, a security team spotted scorch marks on a basement doorway below 4 World Trade Center, on the east side of the ruined complex, according to officials.

Even in a place of mass devastation and death, those scorch marks got fast attention. They had not been noticed by a patrol team a few hours earlier, and behind the damaged -- but intact -- door were nearly a thousand tons of gold and silver. To security officials, it looked as if someone had tried to break in.

Within hours, a video surveillance system was installed to keep at least an electronic eye on the precious metals until their custodian, the Bank of Nova Scotia, had a chance to remove them. That work began this week.

A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver.

[...]

Nearly a quarter of a mile below the spectacular vistas from the towers was their upside-down attic dropping 70 feet below the ground, a strange world with enough room for fortunes in gold and silver, for Godiva chocolates, assault weapons, old furniture, bricks of cocaine, phony taxicabs and Central Intelligence Agency files. With so many people still lost, the owners of this stuff have maintained a discreet silence during the recovery operations. But that doesn't mean they're not interested.

Beneath the Customs House -- 6 World Trade Center -- was an armada of government vehicles, including dozens owned by the Secret Service, in a fenced-off area. Within that area was a garage where a single armored limousine was parked under the tightest security.

[...]

Besides the Secret Service, the building named for the United States Customs Service also housed an office of the C.I.A.

That building is now partly collapsed, with a rubble pit 30 feet deep. Somewhere in there are drugs, weapons and contraband seized by the Customs Service at the region's airports. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also lost two evidence vaults, according to a spokesman for that agency, Joseph Green. They have not yet been recovered.

''There could be several hundred weapons -- somewhere between 200 and 400, ranging from small-caliber semiautomatic pistols to assault rifles,'' Mr. Green said, adding that a few of the guns had been found. Agents plan to be on the scene when the remains of the building are demolished sometime in the next two weeks, he said.

[...]

''After that, we'll be working at the landfill to search for any important items that are still missing.''

For people who have seen the surface destruction, either in pictures or in person, it may be hard to imagine that anything is intact below ground. But engineers and recovery officials say that large parts of the underground perimeter are undamaged, even though the buildings above them are partly collapsed.

One area is below 4 World Trade Center, where more than two decades ago, Swiss Bank built a huge vault and storage area. The vault was reached from the Swiss Bank offices by a private elevator.

[...]

By the time of the 1993 bombing, Swiss Bank no longer was using the vault, and shortly afterward, the bank relocated its remaining operations.

The next tenant of the vault space was the Bank of Nova Scotia, which estimated the value of the metals at $200 million.

''We are in the process of relocating the contents of our vault at World Trade Center building No. 4 to another secure location, because authorities need to demolish the building,'' Pam Agnew, a spokeswoman for the bank, said yesterday by phone from Toronto.

Some of the metal is owned by the bank, and some by its customers, she said. She declined to say where the metals were being taken.

[...]

However, a government official involved in the recovery efforts said that there had clearly been an attempt within the last two weeks to enter the vault area. ''It looked like they used a blowtorch, a crowbar,'' said the official, who spoke on the condition that neither his name nor his position be identified. ''The Port Authority police began periodic patrols, and then a closed-circuit television system was put in.''

The bank also engaged Kroll Inc., a security business based in New York, to supervise the relocation of the gold and silver, a process that began this week, The Daily News reported yesterday.

[...]

The basement of 4 World Trade Center housed vaults used to store gold and silver bullion. Published articles about precious metals recovered from the World Trade Center ruins in the aftermath of the attack mention less than $300 million worth of gold. All such reports appear to refer to a removal operation conducted in late October of 2001. On Nov. 1, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that "more than $230 million" worth of gold and silver bars that had been stored in a bomb-proof vault had been recovered. A New York Times article contained:

Two Brinks trucks were at ground zero on Wednesday to start hauling away the $200 million in gold and silver that the Bank of Nova Scotia had stored in a vault under the trade center ... A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver ..

Reports describing the contents of the vaults before the attack suggest that nearly $1 billion in precious metals was stored in the vaults. A figure of $650 million in a National Real Estate Investor article published after the attack is apparently based on pre-attack reports.

Unknown to most people at the time, $650 million in gold and silver was being kept in a special vault four floors beneath Four World Trade Center.

As in the case of the World Trade Center site, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took control of the crime scene and supervised the official investigation of it. Also as in Manhattan, FEMA officials in Washington appointed volunteers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to investigate the crime and write a report. The team was dubbed the BPS (Building Performance Study). The BPS investigated the response of the building to the crash, not the crash itself, evidence of which was not available to them.

After the Pentagon attack, the video cameras and tapes at a nearby CITGO, the Sheraton Hotel along I395 and Virginia DOT cameras were all confiscated by the FBI and they have yet to disclose any of the contents that were recorded by those cameras. Those cameras would have recorded what came in to hit the Pentagon and if viewed by the public, all the world would know that it was not a Boeing 757, American Airlines Flight 77, as we were told. All the world would know that Bush’s assertion is in fact a huge lie.

The persistent pall of smoke wafting from the remains of the World Trade Center poses a very small, and steadily diminishing, risk to the public, environmental officials and doctors said yesterday.

There could be a slight health threat, they said, to city residents with weakened immune systems, heart disease or asthma, and to rescue workers who did not wear protective gear or who smoke. Smoking greatly amplifies the effects of some kinds of pollution, scientists said.

But over all, the danger was no greater than that on a smoggy day, some officials said.

[...]

Generally, the biggest risk posed by those substances would be to people who have a heightened sensitivity to chemicals, Dr. Siegel said. He said that one of the lowest risks would be from inhaling asbestos fibers, if any were released when the towers fell.

''Even in a worst-case scenario,'' he said, ''most people with asbestos- related lung disease usually had long-term occupational exposure.''

We sent our dust samples taken from the WTC site area to ATC Associates of New York for independent analysis. The first four of our samples (Batch No.2962 analysis date 9/19/01) indicate that the hazards posed by the dust are significant. We urge the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal, State and local health agencies to release their data on the following substances.

FIBERGLASS ...

ASBESTOS ...

DIOXINS and PCBs ...

SMOKE AND GASES ...

SUMMARY. Health officials may think they are doing people a favor by withholding information, but there is no reason to assume that New Yorkers will not be just as courageous in dealing with air quality issues as they have been in dealing with the disaster. Failing to provide this information can cause people to take needless risks. For example, we see footage and personally have witnessed workers toiling in a haze of dust without respiratory protection or protective clothing.

[...]

Abstract: We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 ˚C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.

On August 12, 2005, more than 12,000 pages of oral histories from 503 FDNY firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians were made public after The New York Times sued the City of New York for their release in response to the Bloomberg administration’s decision to withhold the records from the public.

The FDNY had recorded the oral histories between October 2001 and January 2002 at the instruction of the City’s fire commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, who wanted to preserve the accounts of the FDNY’s members “before they became reshaped by a collective memory.”

Following the release of the records, researchers began examining them for any evidence as to the cause of the Twin Towers’ destruction.

One of the greatest mysteries of September 11, 2001 is the collapse of the Twin Towers. Claims that explosions contributed to the collapses were made on 9/11 and have persisted, but studies supportive of the U.S. government’s account of events have ignored or denied these claims. A great deal is at stake in this debate. If explosions were critical to the collapses, the official al Qaeda narrative may need to be radically altered or abandoned altogether.

In January, 2006 an article by David Ray Griffin appeared entitled, “Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories.” Drawing on a collection of oral histories from the New York Fire Department (FDNY), Griffin argued the case for controlled demolition of the towers. I found myself intrigued by the data he had used and impressed by his method, but I decided there was room for further research. I wanted answers to two questions.

(1) Are the roughly 31 witnesses to explosions quoted by Griffin the total of all witnesses to explosions in these sources, or are there others he does not mention?

(2) Are there witnesses in these sources whose testimony supports the non-explosive collapse of the Towers—the U.S. government’s perspective?

A rich vein of city records from Sept. 11, including more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, will be made public today.

The histories -- a mosaic of vision and memory recalling the human struggle against surging fire, confusion, and horror -- were compiled by the New York City Fire Department beginning in October 2001, but to this date, no one from the department has read them all or used them for any official purpose.

The city has announced that it will also release today a written log of calls to the 911 system, many from trapped office workers, as well as tapes of fire dispatchers. Other records, including tapes of 911 operators, are being assembled and are not yet ready for release, city officials said.

The New York Times sought the records under the freedom of information law in February 2002, but the Bloomberg administration refused to make them public and the newspaper sued the city. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeals, New York's highest court, ordered the city to release most, but not all, of the records.

FEMALE BYSTANDER: What was it like?

TYRONE JOHNSON (FDNY LADDER 24): Horrible. The whole building just collapsed on us. Inside the lobby.

MALE BYSTANDER: Was that a secondary explosion?

JOHNSON: Yes, it was. Definitely a secondary explosion. We was inside waiting to go upstairs and on our way upstairs the whole fucking thing blew. And it just collapsed on everybody inside of the lobby.

MALE BYSTANDER: That must be the first tower coming down—

JOHNSON: I don’t know about the first one, but the second one . . . It was terrible. Then there was a third one, too, after that one.

MALE BYSTANDER: There was an explosion after that?

JOHNSON: Yes, there was. Everybody was just inside the building, waiting to go upstairs and it just let loose. Everything just let loose inside the building.

MALE BYSTANDER: So what you’re telling me is that there was the plane or whatever hit the building, then a secondary explosion—

JOHNSON: There was like three explosions after that. We came in after the fire—We came when the fire was going on already. We was in the staging area inside the building, waiting to go upstairs. And then an explosion. The whole lobby collapsed on the lobby inside.

REPORTER: And you were working there?

KENNY JOHANNEMAN: Yes, I was right there. I was in the B—I was down in the basement. Came down. All of a sudden the elevator blew up. Smoke. I dragged a guy out. His skin was hanging off and I dragged him out. And I helped him out to the ambulance.

REPORTER: Arthur Del Bianco is one of the lucky few, able to tell a tale of survival from a hospital bed.

ARTHUR DEL BIANCO: All of a sudden there was, like, “BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!” Like bullet shots. And then, all of a sudden, three tremendous explosions and everything started coming down.

[...]

EYEWITNESS: I think a bomb went off in the lobby first, then a plane hit the building. Then another plane hit the other building. But when I was coming through the doors on the other side of the Trade Center, something—either they blew the lobby up, or something. Because it blew the glass out of the doors and knocked us all down and I got a—smoke and everything on me.

Fireman 1: We made it outside, we made it about a block—

Fireman 2: We made it at least two blocks and we started running. Floor by floor, it started popping out—

Fireman 1: It was as if they had detonated–as if they were planning to take down a building. BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—

Fireman 2: All the way down. I was watching it and running.

NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.

The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

Also in 2006: a whistleblower named Richard A. Grove went public with stunning testimony about his involvement with the Greenberg empire, an up-close-and-personal experience, Grove says, that nearly cost him his life. During the period leading up to 9/11, Grove worked as a salesman for Silverstream Software, an enterprise company which marketed designer solutions to a number of Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Banker’s Trust, Alex Brown, and Morgan Stanley. According to Grove, Silverstream “built internet transactional and trading platforms,” designed “to web-enable the critical business functions of Fortune 500 companies, basically integrating and making available on the web the disparate legacy applications and mainframes while simultaneously streamlining workflow and traditional paper processes.” The “end result [was] a lower cost of operation and more efficient transactions because inefficiencies such as people were being taken out of the loop.”

[...]

Grove says he first noticed fiscal irregularities in October 2000 when he and a colleague helped “identify about $10,000,000 in suspicious purchase orders.” Marsh’s chief information officer, Gary Lasko, later confirmed that “certain vendors were deceiving Marsh … selling … large quantities of hardware that were [sic] not necessary” for the project. But Grove did not worry too much about this at the time; nor did he run into personal trouble until the spring of 2001, when he learned, while negotiating a license renewal contract with Lasko, that his own employer, Silverstream, was over-billing Marsh “to the tune of $7 million, or more.” Grove brought the matter to the attention of Silverstream executives, but was told to keep quiet and mind his own business. A Marsh executive advised him to do the same. By this point, a number of Marsh employees had earned Grove’s trust and when he shared his concerns with them, they agreed that “something untoward was going on.” Grove names these honest employees in his testimonial: Kathryn Lee, Ken Rice, Richard Breuhardt, John Ueltzhoeffer, in addition to Gary Lasko, all of whom perished on 9/11. Incidentally, a simple check confirmed that these names do indeed appear on the fatality list of World Trade Center victims.

All 4 parts of this subsequently censored Fox News report from December 2001

Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.

She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.

Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.

The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.

[...]

This is the story of 9/11 that you didn't watch unfold on your TV that fateful day in 2001. This is the story of the 9/11 War Games.

PART ONE - WAR GAMES

It only stands to reason that government employees, armed forces and first responders spend a considerable amount of time every year training to respond to crises. A major, catastrophic event may only happen once in a lifetime, but if and when it does occur, the appropriate personnel need to know how to respond.

Not all military exercises and government drills are the same, however. These training events can range all the way from computer simulations and war games—where no personnel are deployed and no physical resources are committed—to live field exercises where real people use real equipment and even real munitions to practice responding to real-world emergencies or simulate real warfare. And as these drills and exercises move from abstract models to real-life exercises, the line between reality and simulation can become blurry.

What does it mean, then, when a simulation of an emergency takes place at the exact same place and time as that real emergency is happening in real life?

[...]

ABSTRACT

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 there was a great deal of speculation that the terrorists or their associates had traded in the option market on advanced knowledge of the impending events. It is nearly impossible, however, to assess the option market trading leading up to this or any other event in the absence of systematic information about the characteristics of option market activity. This paper provides this information by computing the distributions of option market volume statistics both unconditionally and when conditioning on the overall level of option activity, the return and trading volume on the underlying stocks, and the return on the overall market. When the option market activity in the days leading up to the terrorist attacks is compared to the benchmark distributions, volume ratio statistics are seen to be at typical levels. An indicator of long put volume, however, appears to be unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks.

After an exhaustive study, Allen Poteshman, a professor of finance at the University of Illinois, has confirmed news reports shortly after Sept. 11, 2001:

Trading in options on airline stocks AMR and UAL indicates someone profited from advance word of the terrorist attacks.

"There is evidence of unusual option market activity in the days leading up to Sept. 11," Poteshman writes in a paper posted on the Internet that goes deeper than the initial reports.

Obviously, authorities missed the market signal. The 9/11 commission might want to look into the matter.

Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market.

An extraordinary number of trades were betting that American Airlines stock price would fall.

The trades are called "puts" and they involved at least 450,000 shares of American. But what raised the red flag is more than 80 percent of the orders were "puts", far outnumbering "call" options, those betting the stock would rise.

Sources say they have never seen that kind of imbalance before, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. Normally the numbers are fairly even.

After the terrorist attacks, American Airline stock price did fall obviously by 39 percent, and according to sources, that translated into well over $5 million total profit for the person or persons who bet the stock would fall.

The 28 pages refers to the final section of the December 2002 report of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This section is titled "Part IV: Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters," and summarizes investigative leads suggesting possible financial, logistical and other support provided to the hijackers and their associates by Saudi Arabian officials and others suspected of being Saudi agents. It was declassified on July 15, 2016.

The 28 pages state that some of the September 11 hijackers received financial support from individuals connected to the Saudi Government. FBI sources believed that at least two of those individuals were officers in the General Intelligence Presidency, the primary intelligence agency of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Intelligence Community believed that individuals associated with the Saudi Government had ties to al-Qaeda.

Plaintiffs in a 9/11 civil suit against Saudi Arabia have alleged that a November 1999 attempt by two men with longstanding ties to the Saudi government—Mohammed al-Qudhaeein and Hamdan al-Shalawi—to get inside an America West Airlines plane's cockpit was "a dry run for the 9/11 attacks." The FBI reportedly confirmed that the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. paid for Qudhaeein and Shalawi's tickets to board that flight. The 28 Pages quoted a document from the FBI's Phoenix Field Office as stating: "Phoenix FBI now believes both men were specifically attempting to test the security procedures of America West Airlines in preparation for and in furtherance of UBL [Osama bin Laden]/Al Qaeda operations."

Some leaked information from CIA and FBI documents allege that there is "incontrovertible evidence" that Saudi government officials, including from the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles, gave the hijackers both financial and logistical aid. Among those named were then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and Osama Bassnan, a Saudi agent, as well as American al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta, and Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.

In 2016, following a declassification review, the Obama Administration approved the declassification of the partially redacted 28 Pages, the Joint Inquiry's only wholly classified section. The document was then sent to congressional leadership and on July 15, 2016, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence approved publication of the newly declassified section.

This declassification followed years of lobbying by families of those killed in the September 11 attacks, insurance companies and others. One influential figure in this effort was Bob Graham, who was a member of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 as a Senator from Florida. Among other things, he said, "the F.B.I. has gone beyond just covering up ... into what I call aggressive deception."

In addition to the events documented in "The 28 pages", US federal government agencies seem to have had three other apparently independent sources of advance warning of the September 11 attacks that were not reported to the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. One was a Saudi family in Sarasota, Fla., which was known by the FBI to have had multiple contacts with the hijackers-to-be training nearby, until the family fled just before the attacks. Another was the Able Danger data mining operation, which reportedly identified two of the three terrorist cells, who subsequently executed the September 11 attacks. A third was an Iranian expatriate, who had warned the FBI multiple times of the impending September 11 attacks. Sibel Edmonds was reportedly fired for insisting that the evidence they had not be suppressed as she says it was.

In April 2016, 60 Minutes aired a segment on the drive to declassify the 28 pages, featuring interviews with former Senator Graham, former Congressman and 9/11 Commission member Tim Roemer, and former 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, as well as attorneys representing 9/11 family members, survivors, and insurers. On the afternoon before the 60 Minutes segment aired, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement urging the release of the pages. The Saudi government voiced support for the declassification of the 28 pages, saying it would "allow us to respond to any allegations in a clear and credible manner". Congressman Stephen Lynch said, "I think there may be some duplicity on the part of the Saudis in terms of them desiring this to be disclosed."

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

In late 1999, al-Qaeda associate Walid bin Attash ("Khallad") contacted Mihdhar, telling him to meet him in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Hazmi and Abu Bara al Yemeni would also be in attendance. The NSA intercepted a telephone call mentioning the meeting, Mihdhar, and the name "Nawaf" (Hazmi). While the agency feared "Something nefarious might be afoot", it took no further action.

The CIA had already been alerted by Saudi intelligence about the status of Mihdhar and Hazmi as al-Qaeda members, and a CIA team broke into Mihdhar's Dubai hotel room and discovered that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. While Alec Station alerted intelligence agencies worldwide about this fact, it did not share this information with the FBI. The Malaysian Special Branch observed the January 5, 2000, meeting of the two al-Qaeda members and informed the CIA that Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Khallad were flying to Bangkok, but the CIA never notified other agencies of this, nor did it ask the State Department to put Mihdhar on its watchlist. An FBI liaison to Alec Station asked permission to inform the FBI of the meeting but was told: "This is not a matter for the FBI."

By late June, senior counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenet were "convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come", although the CIA believed the attacks would likely occur in Saudi Arabia or Israel. In early July, Clarke put domestic agencies on "full alert", telling them "Something really spectacular is going to happen here. soon." He asked the FBI and the State Department to alert the embassies and police departments, and the Defense Department to go to "Threat Condition Delta". Clarke later wrote: "Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI, there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States ... They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemb...

William Edward Binney is a former intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and whistleblower. He retired on October 31, 2001, after more than 30 years with the agency.He was a critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration, and later criticized the NSA's data-collection policies during the Barack Obama administration. He dissented from the view that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election. More specifically, he was critical of the view that Russia hacked the DNC server.

In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had" as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread. He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pleaded to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer; Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of civil disobedience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...

For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the two operations.

However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one’s forgettery or deleted by the corporate media’s flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness, I would like to point out some similarities that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two operations.

The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death. Underlying all fears is the fear of death. A fear that has both biological and cultural roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner.

Destruction of the Twin Towers Foreshadowed in Media.

Predictive Programming - Ultimate Compliation

9/11 Hidden in Hollywood