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The 9/11 Report
The 9/11 Commission Report: An Elaborate Fiction
9/11 Commission Report cover
Click for our mirror of the Report

On July 22, 2004, the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States" , also known as the "9/11 Commission," published its final Report, the "9/11 Commission Report". The Report became a best-seller and was hailed in the corporate media as the definitive report on the attacks. However, the Report is more accurately characterized as the definitive narrative of the official myth of 9/11. As David Ray Griffin points out in his scholarly book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, the Report systematically excludes almost every fact that doesn't support the official story. 1
Omissions and Distortions

Most of what we document on this website has been omitted from the Commission Report, particularly the contents of the analysis section. Indeed, the omissions are so numerous they could fill a book, and do -- David Griffin's 339-page Omissions and Distortions. Here we list only some of the more egregious omissions, falsehoods, and contradictions in the Report. In the following we use 'Report' to refer to the entire Report including the Notes section.
Omissions

* The Report fails to acknowledge that no steel-framed high-rise building has ever collapsed due to fires.
* The Report fails to mention the total collapse of 47-story steel-framed skyscraper Building 7 at 5:20 on the day of the attack.
* The Report contains no mention of the interview in which the owner of Building 7 states that he and the Fire Department decided to "pull" Building 7 -- an apparent admission of a conspiracy to destroy the building and its contents.
* The Report fails to mention the rapid removal and recycling of the structural steel from the collapsed World Trade Center buildings, even to make excuses for it.
* The Report makes no mention of a statement by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to Peter Jennings indicating he had foreknowledge of the collapses: "We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of the building."
* The Report contains no mentions of eyewitness accounts of explosions preceding the collapse of South Towers.
* The Report fails to mention that George W. Bush's brother, Marvin Bush, and his cousin, Wirt Walker III, were principals in the company that had the contract to provide security for the World Trade Center, Stratesec, nor does it mention the company.
* The Report makes no mention of the fact that a new lessor took control of the World Trade Center complex just six weeks before the attack, obtained an insurance policy covering terrorist attacks, and successfully sued the insurance companies to obtain twice the multi-billion-dollar value of the policy.
* The Report repeats the list of 19 suspects identified by the FBI within days of the attack, while failing to mention that six of them reported themselves alive after the attack.
* The Report fails to mention any of the reports of behavior by the alleged hijackers before the attack that belie the official story that they were devout Muslims on a suicide mission for Allah.
* The Report fails to mention that the published passenger lists contained no Arab names -- a fact publicized by skeptics of the official story.
* The Report fails to ask why the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was not stopped by anti-aircraft missile batteries that presumably ring the building.
* The Report fails to mention that no credible footage of the Pentagon attack has been made public, despite public knowledge that the FBI seized footage of the attack from nearby businesses.
* The Report does not ask why the Secret Service did not obtain air cover for the President's motorcade from the Sarasota school to the airport, nor for Air Force One, which took off at about 9:54, until about 11:10.
* The Report avoids mentioning several reports that government officials and business leaders received warnings and avoided targets of the attacks, including:
o A warning by the FBI advising Attorney General John Ashcroft to avoid flying on commercial airlines.
o The report that Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans the evening before the attack.
o The cancellation of plans by Ariel Sharon to attend an event in New York City on 9/11/01.
o A warning to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown to avoid flying.
o The grounding of Salman Rushdie by Scotland Yard.
* The Report avoids mentioning a warning received by employees of Odigo hours before the attack.
* The Report does not mention that letters with weaponized anthrax were sent to the two most powerful senators attempting to slow the passage of the 9/11/01 attack-predicated USA PATRIOT Act.
* The Report states that the Commission was "chartered to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including preparedness for and the immediate response to the attacks," but fails to mention that it makes no attempt to meet its charter.

Falsehoods

* The Report's Notes state: "the interior core of the [Twin Towers] was a hollow steel shaft, in which the elevators and stairwells were grouped." In fact, the core structures were composed of bundles of steel columns numbering 47 and having outside dimensions, in most cases, of 36 by 16 inches and 54 by 22 inches.
* The Report states that the "South Tower collapsed in ten seconds," when it actually took about 15 seconds. While one might expect that the Commission would overstate rather than understate the collapse time, the fact that the Commission did not even consider a collapse time within one second of the vacuum free-fall time of 9.2 seconds a problem for the official explanation is evidence that the Commission would endorse that explanation no matter what the facts.
* Regarding the failure to promptly move George W. Bush from the known location of the Sarasota classroom, the Report states that "No one in the traveling party had any information during this time that other aircraft were hijacked or missing." Yet, according to evidence assembled by David Griffin, the Secret Service has open lines to the FAA, whose top operations people in the northeast corridor thought that as many as 11 planes had been hijacked. 2
* The Report states: "The threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airliners within the United States -- and using them as guided missiles -- was not recognized by NORAD before 9/11." (The Report repeats the assertion three times.) Yet media reports, such as the USA Today article entitled "NORAD had drills of jets as weapons" describe pre-9/11 NORAD drills involving hijacked jetliners crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 3
* The Report states: "The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, 'vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,' where it could perform its mission to monitor the aircraft's flight path." Yet the order referenced by the footnote for this statement (Order 7610.4J: Special Military Operations), states:
7-2-1. FACILITY NOTIFICATION

The FAA hijack coordinator will advise the appropriate center/control tower of the identification of the military unit and location tasked to provide the hijack escort. The center/control tower shall coordinate with the designated NORAD SOCC/ROCC/military unit advising of the hijack aircraft's location, direction of flight, altitude, type aircraft and recommended flight plan to intercept the hijack aircraft. The center/control tower shall file the coordinated flight plan. 4
* To address the charge that Saudi nationals were flown out of the country before the post-9/11 flight ban was lifted, the Report states: "we found no evidence that any flights of Saudi nationals, domestic or international, took place before the reopening of national airspace on the morning of September 13, 2001." In fact national airspace was only open to commercial airliners on a case-by-case basis on September 13, 2001. It was not until September 15th that the skies were opened to general aviation (privately owned aircraft). 5 Yet the Lear Jet that flew Saudi nationals from Tampa, FL to Lexington, KY on September 13th was a private plane. 6

Contradictions

* The Report notes that Hani Hanjour's pilot application was rejected, and that he was a "terrible pilot," on the one hand, but asserts that he was "operation's most experienced pilot," and piloted Flight 77 through a 330-degree spiral dive maneuver, on the other.
* The Report explains that the suicide terrorists chose not to target a nuclear power plant because they "thought a nuclear target would be difficult because the airspace around it was restricted, making reconnaissance flights impossible and increasing the likelihood that any plane would be shot down before impact." (p 245) It fails to apply the same logic to their targeting of the Pentagon, which, being the heart of the US military, is presumably even better defended than a nuclear power plant.
* The Report addresses the question of why George W. Bush remained in the publicly known location of the Sarasota school until 9:35 AM -- a half hour after the second Tower strike -- by relating that Bush "told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis," (p38) and that the Secret service "told us they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door." (p39) The Report implicitly accepts these explanations as satisfactory, thereby implying that for Bush to have taken any less than a half hour to leave the school would have required him to display an excited reaction and to "run out the door."

This list only touches on some of the more obvious omissions from the Report. Even Griffin's book -- the most thorough critique of the Report to date -- is far from exhaustive. In 2005, Griffin wrote The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie, which provides 115 points on which the Report lies, either explicitly or implicitly.
The 9-11 Research Mirror of the Commission Report

The 9/11 Commission Report is published in its entirety on the 9/11 Commission website. However, the site appears to be designed to make it difficult to analyze the Report. In particular, there is apparently no easy way to search the text of the Report for keywords -- a requirement to quickly discover what is missing -- because of the following design features.

* Each of the Report's sections -- which include 13 chapters, appendices, a preface, and notes -- is provided as a separate HTML document. Performing a search thus requires a tedious traversal of each of the score of documents, given that the Report is not provided in the form of an aggregate HTML document.
* The complete Report is provided as a PDF document, but is a hefty 7.4 megabytes in size, and some PDF viewers don't have a word search feature.
* The Search tool searches the entire site, which includes a large body of hearing transcripts many times the size of the Report itself. There is no obvious way to restrict the search to the Report only.
* The website's use of the base HTML tag breaks spiders, making it more difficult for researchers to download the Report's HTML as a whole in order to analyze it.
* The Table of Contents pages do not link into the sections within chapters.

Due to these deficiencies in the now-frozen version of the Report published on the Commission's website, we have posted a local mirror of the report with corrections here . The mirror preserves the Report's content while assembling all its parts except the notes into a single HTML document. The notes occupy a second document because of their size. The Table of Contents is consolidated into the main document. Thus, using the mirror, you can search the entire Report by simply browsing two HTML documents.

In addition to these changes to the Report's organization, we have linked phrases in the Report's introduction, such as independent, bipartisan, full and complete account, preparedness, and immediate response to the attacks, to pertinent pages of 9-11 Research.
References

1. The 9/11 Commission Report; Omissions and Distortions, Olive Branch Press, 2004
2. The 9/11 Commission Report ..., Olive Branch Press, 2004, page 46-48
3. NORAD had Drills of Jets as Weapons, USA Today, 4/18/2004 [cached]
4. NORAD had Drills of Jets ..., 4/18/2004
5. Order 7610.4J: Special Military Operations, FindLaw.com, 11/3/98,7/12/01 [cached]
6. Phantom Flight From Florida, The Tampa Tribune, 10/5/01 [cached]

page last modified: 2010-05-17