The Rewriting of the History of 9-11
March 24, 2005
The government has confiscated crucial
evidence from the terror attacks of 9-11 while news reports that contradict the
official version have been removed from public news archives.
When a major catastrophe occurs it is
important to monitor the first news reports because they often describe a very
different version of events than the reports written after government spin
doctors have gotten their fingers into the story. The early reports, more candid
and honest than those that follow, need to be preserved for the historical
record. The reports from journalists, photographs, videos, and eyewitness
accounts from 9-11 are evidence and historical documents of the terror attacks
that changed history. To remove, withhold, or delete documents from the
historical record is illegal - and a crime against history.
From the day of the attacks, however,
agents of the
As the Washington Times reported
on September 21, 2001:
"A security camera atop a hotel close to
the Pentagon may have captured dramatic footage of the hijacked Boeing 757
airliner as it slammed into the western wall of the Pentagon. Hotel employees
sat watching the film in shock and horror several times before the FBI
confiscated the video as part of its investigation. "It may be the only
available video of the attack. The Pentagon has told broadcast news reporters
that its security cameras did not capture the crash," the Times reported.
While this video and another confiscated from a nearby gas station are crucial
evidence of the attack on the Pentagon, the government has withheld them.
Why has the government confiscated and
withheld these videos from the official investigators and the public? The
withholding of this evidence suggests they contain evidence that contradicts the
official version of events.
FLIGHT 93 LANDED IN
The first, an AP wire story, was
"copied, pasted, and posted" on the website of Cincinnati's WCPO-TV at 11:43
a.m. (ET) on September 11, 2001, by Liz Foreman. The AP report said that United
Airlines Flight 93 had landed in
Foreman told me that she had taken the
story directly from the AP wire service:
A Boeing 767
out of
White said
the plane had been moved to a secure area of the airport, and was evacuated.
United
identified the plane as Flight 93. The airline did say [sic] how many people
were aboard the flight.
United said
it was also 'deeply concerned' about another flight, Flight 175, a Boeing 767,
which was bound from
On behalf of
the airline CEO James Goodwin said: 'The thoughts of everyone at United are with
the passengers and crew of these flights. Our prayers are also with everyone on
the ground who may have been involved. United is working with all the relevant
authorities, including the FBI, to obtain further information on these flights,'
he said.
This report of 147 words, which can
still be found at the station's archives, has been purged from the historical
record. The story's original location on WCPO's website brings up a page with
the title, but no story.
This is what one finds today:
Plane Lands
In
"This story
has been removed from WCPO.com. It was a preliminary AP story, and was
factually incorrect."
A seemingly well-documented AP story
quoting senior United Airlines personnel and the mayor of
Foreman told me that the story remained
on WCPO's website until "a year and a half ago" when it was removed after a
radio talk show brought attention to it. "The government did not call me up,"
Foreman said. "It did not go on the air."
Why was WCPO the only website that
picked up the AP story? I asked Connie Mabin, AP's
EXPLOSIVES IN THE TOWERS
A second story that was kept out of the
public archives was written on September 11, 2001, by veteran journalist Olivier
Uyttebrouck of the Albuquerque Journal. The story appeared on the second
page of the Journal's 9-11 extra edition. The story was based on a telephone
conversation with Van Romero, an explosives expert and former director of the
Energetic Materials Research & Testing Center (EMRTC), the "bomb school" at New
Mexico Tech (NMT).
"EMRTC studies explosions," its website
says. "About 100 staff workers and 20 students study explosive materials and the
effects of explosions on structures of all kinds."
"At its core," Uyttebrouck later wrote,
"Tech is as much a federal work site as a university. Not only does much of its
research money come from the Department of Defense, one in 10 Tech graduates
takes a job at one of the state's nuclear labs: Sandia or
"The Defense Department pays for 37
percent of Tech's research funding; the Department of Energy, 20 percent; the
National Science Foundation, 14 percent; and the remainder is from other
sources," he wrote.
Van Romero spoke with Uyttebrouck
shortly after the twin towers collapsed. Uyttebrouck wrote on 9-11:
Televised
images of the attacks on the
The collapse
of the buildings appears 'too methodical' to be a chance result of airplanes
colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
'My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World
Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused
the towers to collapse,' Romero said.
The article was published on-line under
the title "Explosives Planted in towers, N.M. Tech Expert Says." An archivist at
the paper told me that the print article was titled "Use of explosives believed"
and ran on page A2 in an extra edition on September 11, 2001. The extra edition
of the paper was archived in the usual manner, according to Judy Pence,
librarian for Journal.
The Uyttebrouck story, however, is not
found in any of the public archives of news articles from September 11, 2001. I
asked NewsBank, Inc. of
Kent Walz, editor of the Albuquerque
Journal, was unaware that the Uyttebrouck article is not in the national
newspaper data banks. The article is in the Journal's archive, he said,
which is accessible to subscribers. Walz told me that he had not withheld the
story. The contents of the extra edition were sent to the archives as usual,
Walz said. "I don't know of any instructions to the contrary."
Immediately after the collapses, Romero
said, "The collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions
used to demolish old structures.
"'It would be difficult for something
from the plane to trigger an event like that,' Romero said in a phone interview
from
"Romero said he and another Tech
administrator were on a Washington-area subway when an airplane struck the
Pentagon. He said he and Denny Peterson, vice president for administration and
finance, were en route to an office building near the Pentagon to discuss
defense-funded research programs at Tech."
The article concluded:
The
detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a common terrorist
strategy, Romero said.
'One of the
things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary
device,' Romero said.
Attackers
detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts emergency personnel to
the scene, then detonate a second explosion, he said.
Romero said
that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the
collision of the planes into the towers.
"FIRE, NOT EXPLOSIVES"
A search of NewsBank for articles from
the Journal about the events of 9-11 does not find Uyttebrouck's article
but yields a later article written by John Fleck dated September 21, 2001,
titled "Fire, Not Extra Explosives,
A
'Certainly
the fire is what caused the building to fail,' said Van Romero, a vice president
at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
The day of
the attack, Romero told the Journal the towers' collapse, as seen in news
videotapes, looked as though it had been triggered by carefully placed
explosives.
I wrote to Romero asking why he changed
his opinion. He had not responded by press time.
On January 2002, it was reported that
Romero was appointed national chairman of the National Domestic Preparedness
Consortium (NDPC). Romero, who works as a lobbyist for NMT was credited for
procuring some $56 million for the school in 2003. Romero reportedly was
"influential" in making his university "first in the nation" among institutions
of higher education for receiving federal funds.