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March 5, 2005 - Art Bell
02:53:11
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ben Chertoff - Debunking 911 Myths
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So, let's get started.
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, as the
case may be.
Peace.
Covering all of these time zones.
What do I mean by that?
The entire world's time zones.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
Good morning in most places.
I'm Art Bell.
And tonight is going to be an extremely contentious radio program.
Very, very Contentious.
We're going to have Ben Chertoff on.
Yes, somehow the distant cousin of Michael Chertoff in the next hour from Popular Mechanics.
And we're going to talk about 9-11.
And I have a whole lot to say about this.
And those who have been emailing me, in fact, I have selected a group of emails that I have received recently.
Real jewels that I'm going to read to you, I don't know, maybe shortly.
It's going to get my adrenaline going so much that it's like I want to get the rest of the news out of the way before I begin getting that angry.
President Assad on Saturday has announced a two-stage pullout of Syrian forces from the Lebanese border, but he failed to address broad international demands that he completely withdraw Syria's 15,000 troops After nearly 30 years in the country, Assad also did not respond to the President's demand just a day earlier that Syria withdraw all its troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon before its parliamentary elections in May.
Islamic terror groups are becoming increasingly active in Germany and coordinating apparently with militants across Europe to recruit fighters to join the insurgency help in Iraq, of course.
Equipping them with such needy items as fake passports, money, medical supplies, security.
Officials say that it's one of the best examples of the cross-continent cooperation involved.
One involved an Algerian man arrested in Germany and now on trial in Italy for allegedly helping Muslims from Somalia, Egypt, Iraq, and Monaco recruit some 200 militants from all around Europe Join the fight in Iraq.
A team of US and Ethiopian scientists has discovered the fossilized remains of what they believe is humankind's first walking ancestor, a hominid that lived in the wooded grasslands of the Horn of Africa about four million years ago.
The bones were discovered in February, At a new site called Mill in the northeastern Afar region of Ethiopia, according to Bruce Latimer, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio, they're estimated to be about 3.84 million years old.
And finally, world news-wise, a new Social Security war room inside the Treasury Department is pumping out information to sell President Bush's plan.
Much like any political campaign might do, it's part of a coordinated effort by the Bush administration.
The internal taxpayer-funded campaigning is backed up by television advertisements, grassroots organizing, and lobbying from business and other groups that support the Bush plan.
The President's opponents are organized as well, though they do not, of course, enjoy the resources of the White House or Treasury to sell their message.
I'm not sure.
The President's plan is to allow some certain portion of Social Security money, your money, your money, to be put into the stock market.
So that it might earn more money would be, I guess, the selling point.
But what if the market crashes?
Or better said, perhaps, When the market crashes, what's going to happen?
You know, this whole idea of putting people's Social Security money into the stock market, I think, is nothing but a big blame-shifting operation.
Now, what do I mean by a blame-shifting operation?
Well, you see, I, like most other people, I think that it's clear that if nothing else happens, Social Security is doomed!
I heard something the other day about, well, if you're 55 years or older, well, you're OK.
But if you're not, then you're not OK.
I think it's doomed.
So here's what I think.
I think the administration knows it's doomed.
And this way, if you take a good portion of your Social Security and you put it into the stock market, the market crashes and you lose your money.
When the entire social security program goes kaboom, then they can shift the blame onto you, you see?
They can say, well, hey, you invested your money and it didn't go well, and that's your choice.
You know, you took that chance, and of course that would be right, but it'll be really shifting the blame, because now for administrations, three at least, the government has been stealing that money.
That's where the real blame ought to go.
But you see, if the money is off into the stock market, and things go wrong for you, well then they can blame you, instead of you blaming them!
Over the years, they have taken the money from the Social Security Fund that now makes it nearly not solvent, or soon not solvent, and this way, instead of you blaming them, i.e.
the government, The government can say to you, well, you just made a bad investment.
Anyway, that's how I... In a moment, some of the other I'm-still-trying-to-get-it-out kind of news before I get angry type news.
But it's interesting stuff, so stay right there.
This one's a real winner.
There's a, I guess, a website or a hosting site for The modern version of rants, which they choose to call blogs.
Blogs are really just people, you know, letting loose with what they want to say.
And it's kind of an area where, you know, anybody can see anything and sure enough.
On this site called Negative Zero, sub-headline, their slogan, I guess, keeping it real one day at a time.
Keeping it real one day at a time, really?
Well, until about two days ago.
There was this detailed plan.
Well, let me read you a little bit of it.
It says, uh, all right, everyone.
We're going to be part of the largest, one of the largest hoaxes ever.
Don't post this on any other message boards.
Read below for details.
If you tell anyone, tell only those you know in real life, underlined, in real life.
The Great Internet UFO Hoax.
On Saturday, March 19th, Many people on the internet will hoax the world with the biggest mass UFO sighting in years.
The craft will zoom around the United States and the world will, according to the diagram and the link, and they had a diagram and a link, all times are PM unless otherwise noted.
Note to you all, you can't get in trouble for reporting this to any of the following.
You have my 100% guarantee.
Also, all reports can be made anonymously.
What the blank do I report seeing?
And then it goes into exactly what you should report.
The above is a rough estimate of what you saw.
Kraft with four lights, two of which... Anyway, it goes on describing the Kraft that all these people in different time zones would presumably hear and then report.
He listed just about every single UFO reporting agency in the world, certainly in the U.S.
And he listed my program to call up.
And oh, fake it!
You know, get through, and just say what you saw, and we're going to have this giant hoax on the 19th of the month.
So, naturally it got sent to me, and I went on the site myself, and I just wrote a comment down at the bottom, which said, Hey idiot, you're busted.
Art Bell.
Next day, site gone.
It was just gone.
So, I guess they're back to the drawing board on the big hoax.
What a stupid idea.
So, there it is, folks, from negative zero, keeping it real, one day at a time.
Ha!
While we're into the subject, someone asks, Art, have you noticed any weird Animal behavior.
You get anything from California people on weird animal behavior?
No, but I do have a couple of stories about weird animal behavior.
All right, try this one.
Headline is, spate of canine suicides from bridge baffling animal experts on a wet and windy winter's day on the west coast of Scotland.
The ancient borough of Dumbarton can appear bleak and depressing.
The once fashionable and prosperous shipbuilding center is now Little more than a suburb of Glasgow, and it appears even some of the dogs have lost the will to live.
Animal behaviorists are concerned at an apparent spate of canine suicides in the town after at least five dogs are said to have thrown themselves from an historic bridge in the past six months.
In the once landscaped grounds of Overton House, a country mansion built in 1863 with ornate religious symbolism in the words fear God and keep his commands carved into the walls of bridges fast becoming known as rovers leap following a rash of unexplained incidents in which family pets have simply decided to leap to their deaths from the bridge animal
Welfare experts are warning owners to keep their dogs on a tight leash.
You see, animals, dogs anyway, don't commit suicide.
They have a very strong sense of fight or flight.
According to Doreen Graham of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the incidents at the bridge are indeed of a very great concern to us because we'd like to understand why they're happening.
In the latest, a woman was shocked to see her dog suddenly just vault over the top of the bridge and plunge 40 feet to its death with no apparent reason and this is now five dogs that have done this have you ever heard of anything like that in your life I know you've heard of this more than 20 rough-toothed dolphins have died since Wednesday's beaching
By about 70 of the marine mammals, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary spokesperson Cleva Hex said Saturday, about a day or so before the dolphins swam ashore, the USS Philadelphia, it seems, had conducted exercises with the Navy SEALs just off Key West, about 45 miles from Marathon, where the dolphins became stranded.
Navy officials didn't have a word to say.
When they were asked if the submarine based at Groton, Connecticut might have used sonar during the exercise, they were mum.
Some scientists surmise that loud bursts of sonar, which can be heard for miles and miles in the water, may perhaps disorient or scare marine mammals, causing them to surface too quickly and suffer the equivalent of what divers know as the bends.
Or I guess you could say they're committing suicide.
Right?
If a fish, or a dolphin in this case, intentionally swims upon shore where you know it's going to die, it is in essence committing suicide.
Right?
Maybe I ought to get this one out.
Solar flares and frigid temperatures are believed to be working with human chemicals To eat away at the protective ozone layer above the North Pole, surprising scientists who have been looking for evidence that the planet's ozone layer might be healing.
You see, by now it was thought that the particles, CFCs, that were going into the ozone layer and destroying it would have, since we banned them, it should be healing up.
But we're having a problem.
The ozone layer Protects Earth from dangerous ultraviolet radiation which can cause skin cancer, right?
Last winter, Arctic ozone declined more precipitously than ever before in the upper atmosphere, probably because of violent storms on the sun's surface, according to at least one idea.
And in recent days, a lower layer of ozone has undergone an extraordinary thinning Because of a level of bitter cold, get this folks, about minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit, rarely seen in the Arctic, in man-made chemicals.
One Colorado scientist has raced north to try and document the event, expecting now to perhaps sputter out within days, so he's got to get there very quickly.
The two unusual findings have experts worried that they don't fully understand the dynamics of ozone Depletion.
Now, here's a couple of more things to be perhaps concerned about.
You decide.
These two items were in a local Tacoma, Washington newspaper called Earth Week.
Quoting it directly, scientists measuring the temperature and salinity of deep waters in the Southern Ocean Warned that recent changes there could have a major impact on global climate.
Multinational team of researchers says that water at the ocean floor off Antarctica has cooled significantly and has become less salty than it was 10 years ago.
Expedition leader Steve Rintal of Australia says the changes could mean the deep water currents are beginning to slow down.
You know, I've heard about that somewhere before.
Anyway, the second article said, temperatures in southern Greenland soared to record levels that were even higher than those normally reached in mid-summer.
The official temperature of 61 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded in the southwest coastal town of Frederikshavn, was the highest winter reading since record-keeping began.
And here in the desert, as I've been telling you, oh, I don't know, Over the last several weeks, if not months, we've had, without question, the wettest winter on record in the desert.
In fact, last week, I think, I put up a picture of the desert here, adjacent to my home, which normally is quite brown and desert-like.
We are, after all, no more than about 20 miles from Death Valley.
And so this is very serious desert that I live in.
Very, very serious desert.
It's designed to be that way.
We like it that way.
But lately, it just hasn't been that way.
Lately, folks, it's been raining, and then raining more, and some more.
It rained, in fact, last night.
We've been getting so much rain that we have standing water everywhere, beginning to worry about mosquitoes.
Things are turning green at a rate that would shock Anybody who's ever been to the desert, it almost looks like a golf course out there.
And so last week I put up a picture of this golf course.
It really is amazing.
Now, at the same time, the American Northwest is going dry.
I suppose the jet stream has probably driven all of this weather to the south, or perhaps it's El Nino or whatever.
They haven't named it yet.
They haven't really talked about it.
I haven't heard any talk about that.
The American Southwest Desert is becoming a green... My God, there'll be redwoods here pretty soon if this doesn't stop.
And the Northwest is just drying up.
So, whether that's just some short, weird trend or not, I don't know.
What I do know is that it represents the wettest winter we've had in all the record keeping here in the desert of wet winters.
So how about that?
The U.S.
military, gonna love this, is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to two kilometers away.
Now you see, they're going to use this, oh, for example, when there's a riot or something.
It's meant to leave the victim unharmed, but pain researchers are angry as hell Because it was their work at, you know, coming up with something that would control pain that has instead been used to develop a weapon.
And they fear the technology will be used for torture.
Let's see.
I am deeply concerned about the ethical aspects of this research, said Andrew Rice, a consultant in pain medicine at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London in the UK.
Even if the use of temporary severe pain can be justified as a restraining measure, which I do believe it can, the long-term physical and psychological effects are unknown.
So what it boils down to is, these men have done research on a way to treat people in terrible, uncontrollable pain.
They've come up with something or another that will treat this pain.
It's a wonderful thing.
Like most things that have one really good side, I'm sure somebody in the military said, whoa-ho-ho!
Pain, huh?
Look at that!
Now we know what causes absolutely uncontrollable pain, and we can project it like a ray gun!
So, of course, the military got immediately interested.
What do they do?
The military breaks things, kills people, and now inflicts pain.
They took the idea.
But you see, the other argument to be made for this is it's better to make somebody feel a lot of pain than to have to put a slug through their forehead.
So there's two ways of thinking about this.
These non-lethal methods of controlling crowds and people are much better than lethal ones.
But still in all, if you were the researcher doing the thing on the pain and They turned it into that, you might be pretty ticked off.
As I am this morning for a few reasons that you're about to find out.
we'll be right back Abunimba, Abunimba, Abunimba
In the eyes of an animal Abunimba
Can you hear my heartbeat in this heart?
Do you know that behind all these walls Lies a deep desire
When it was enough, we were burning We were gonna go all the way
And we never had a doubt We were burning with the light
Way in the shadows From day to night
Till the morning light We were running, running in the night
Abunimba, Abunimba, Abunimba To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at areaco.com.
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From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
Myths and conspiracy theories.
That's what we're about to get into.
And heavily at that.
stay right there tell you what let's start out easily in the uh...
the myth and conspiracy side of things showing This will be an easy one, really.
You know, for a lot of years now, I've listened to people talk about the fact that we never went to the moon.
A lot of people think we never went to the moon, right?
They have prevailed upon us for a very long time.
Wayne Green was one of those people, and there were many others, people who just thought we never went to the moon.
Man never did it.
Well, a European spacecraft now orbiting the moon could turn out to be a kind of a time machine, one way, as it photographs old landing sites of Soviet robotic probes and, of course, areas where American Apollo crews sat down and even explored.
New imagery of old Apollo touchdown spots from the European Space Agency's Smart One probe might just put to rest conspiratorial thoughts that the U.S.
astronauts didn't go the distance.
and scuff up the lunar landscape, they're going to prove it.
They're going to take pictures of it.
Fringe theorists have said that images of the waving flag, oh, you remember that one, right?
On a moon with no atmosphere and other oddities show that NASA never really went to the moon at all.
No serious scientist or spaceflight historian doubts the success of the Apollo program.
But we are observing some of the landing sites for calibration and ground truth purposes.
That's what he said.
What does that mean?
Let's think about that statement.
We're observing some of the landing sites for calibration.
That I get.
Calibration, in other words, geographically where these spots are and ground truth purposes.
That was The chief scientist of the ESA science program, Ground Truth Purposes.
That means to perhaps reveal to those who have been chattering in our ear with these conspiracy theories all these years that they're whack and we really did land on the moon.
I certainly think we landed on the moon.
I also think that our own government, that President Bush, our president, whatever I think of the president, I'm no fan of his, you just heard me Take off on the Social Security thing a little while ago, I did not vote for the President, which I've told you before.
Does that shock you?
Well, anyway, it's the truth, I didn't.
So I'm no great fan of the Presidents.
Nor many other Presidents, for that matter.
I was a big fan of Ronald Reagan's, but not really this President.
Nor am I anti-Bush, particularly, either.
It depends on the issue.
Now, in the case of Social Security, I just told you what I thought a little while ago, but in the case of 9-11, 9-11, when these horrible men took those airplanes and plowed them into U.S.
assets, and took thousands of American lives, and brought down the World Trade Center buildings, and crashed into the Pentagon, And took another plane that people, passengers on the plane courageously crashed before they could do their evil deed, whatever it was, the White House, whatever they had in mind.
I pretty much, you see, believe that it came down the way it seemed to come down.
Occam's razor, the most likely thing seems to be true.
We know the planes hit the buildings.
I know anyway.
It's my belief that they really hit the buildings.
It's my belief that the President of these United States, George Bush, or any other president that I've known, even Dick Nixon, would never order thousands of their own citizens killed in such a horrible attack on America.
And I know for one second, not one second, do I believe any of it.
Baby, have I taken grief for that position?
Let me read you a few emails that have come in in the last, I don't know, few days.
Okay?
This is from Lon C. in Florida.
Lon C. says, Hey Art, why won't you talk about 9-11?
Art, who bought you out?
Or are you just another mindless government mouthpiece?
How come you're not answering the 10 questions sent to you by Victor Thrawn?
How many times have you read a piece entitled 25 Rules of Disinformation?
You keep being the poster boy for the New World Order, people like you.
And the other neocons in the mainstream media make me sick!
Wake up, Art, and take off the rose-colored glasses.
9-11 was an inside job!
Launcey in Florida.
Or this one.
This is from Michael Ferreira of WingTV.
WingnutTV, I call it.
Michael Ferreira.
He's been peppering me with these nasty emails for months now.
He says, in this particular one that came tonight, he says, Art, you're a traitor.
You're a coward.
You're a sellout of America!
DEFEND YOURSELF, TRAITOR!
That's what Michael says to me most times when he writes.
Stuff like that.
Doesn't go beyond that, usually.
You're a traitor!
You're a coward!
You're a sellout of America!
DEFEND YOURSELF, TRAITOR!
Or how about this from Penny?
Penny says, the fires of hell are made to roast lying whores like you.
Art, the fires of hell are made to roast lying whores like you.
Let me see.
This is from Jack.
Jack doesn't say where he is.
Jack says, I see you're preparing to have the Popular Mechanics government disinformation, that's in parenthesis, view of 9-11 on tonight.
Will there be an opposing point of view, Art?
I doubt it.
Except perhaps from the listeners.
You've gone, Art, from being a pioneer to being a toady for this lying, fascist, neocon government.
Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will realize the government's claims are lies, and that Popular Mechanics picked which claims they chose to debunk.
The 9-11 Commission's report should occupy the same garbage can as the Warren Commission report.
Thank God George Norrie Has some courage and is not sold out.
Why has your intellect and courage failed you, Art?
And then, let's see, this is Jerry.
Jerry writes, Hey Art, since you're going to have Ben Chertoff on as a guest this Saturday, well, how about giving equal time to the other side and have Alex Jones on as a guest?
George has the nerve to have him on, Do you?
Better yet, why not have both Alex Jones and Ben Chertoff on at the same time and have a debate?
Regards, Jerry.
And then to follow that up, I got a call from our producer this afternoon who said, hey Art, you're not going to believe this.
Dave von Kleist, he's another Alex Jones type.
Dave von Kleist, a publicist, has called and is wanting equal time.
Uh, tonight.
Now, hmm, let's think about this a little bit.
Alex Jones, David Kleist.
Now, am I, am I wrong here, or didn't George have Alex Jones on all by himself?
Didn't he?
Was there anybody there to debate him or debunk him?
When Alex told his story, why no, there wasn't.
He also had Dave Van Cleist on.
Right?
All by himself, with nobody there to point out what they felt was wrong with what he was saying.
Right?
These are two 9-11 conspiratorial researchers.
Right?
Alex Jones, I think, is a talk show host on his own.
Dave Van Cleist.
Anyway, 9-11 in plain sight.
They've both been on, all by themselves, I do believe.
Is that not true?
Why?
Yes, of course it is.
And so, why in heaven's name would I be required to have somebody on to argue with my guest tonight who's got his point of view?
I'm just curious about that.
I got so many emails saying, you can have one without having somebody to say the other side of the story?
You mean the other side of the story hasn't been told on this program?
Gee, where have you folks been?
You know it has.
So tonight, Popular Mechanics is going, and they did a pretty good job.
You know, they went to the Bureau of Standards, was one of their big sources.
They went to a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers.
They interviewed them about perhaps at least the 16 most popular conspiratorial wingnut theories and uh... they're going to debunk them as first time as far as i first time far as i know that this side of it is even been aired on this program so i think that uh... it's more than fair absolutely more more than for now it here's something else interesting that has occurred over on the uh... jeff went to rents uh... website
All of a sudden, late today, in a panic, appeared the article by, who did this?
Christopher Bolin, I think it is.
The headline is, Bell hosts Popular Mechanic's MAG 9-11 debunker.
And I'll read this whole article, and we're going to let Benjamin Respond to it, but basically the tenets are that he's the cousin of Michael Chertoff.
Now, I asked Benjamin about that a little bit earlier.
Indeed, it probably is true.
He might be the 14th millionth distant removed cousin of Michael, who's the new Homeland Defense Director.
So there may indeed be a relationship there, but so what?
As a matter of fact, I don't even think that Benjamin knew there was a relationship until it was pointed out to him today.
Then, like so many articles on the Rents site that appear from time to time, I think it's clearly, in my opinion, an anti-Semitic website.
uh... let's see at the bottom of this article by uh... boleyn on the rent site it says
controlled press hides here uh... church here
i'll get it straight Chertoff's Israeli roots.
Really?
Let's see.
Claims that there are ties, Michael's ties, that would be Michael many times removed from Benjamin, Michael's ties to Israel and the Mossad.
So these will be things that this night I will ask Benjamin about.
I'm not afraid of asking anything of anybody.
Contrary to what these wingnuts who've been sending me these kinds of messages believe, I'll ask anybody anything.
And as a matter of fact, I'll give all of you an opportunity to ask anything you would like.
This is going to be one point, one particular point of view tonight, and the point of view is that what you believe was true about 9-11 is in fact true, in terms of at least how it happened.
The conspiracy behind doing it, and those who did it, and why they did it, we haven't unraveled all of that yet, have we?
But the fact that it was people mostly from different foreign countries, is probably going to end up to be true.
That they took airplanes, smashed them into the buildings, I think is going to end up to be true, and already has in my mind.
And people who would say that the President of the United States, George Bush, ordered this attack on his own country, I think are off their Nuts.
Okay?
So, Call Me What You Will, Traitor, and all the other names that you've laid on me there, Call Me What You Will, that is what I will continue to believe, and I think people like you, all you people who have written me these type things, are off your nuts.
That's what I think.
I think it's a fringe group that uh... that is formed uh... it with the gathering it's like a snowball rolling downhill getting to be bigger and bigger and bigger and i i think it's nutty uh... nevertheless this night we will have benjamin chitov on and he will uh... certainly answer questions on the telephone uh... from all of you even even the uh... the kinds of questions that uh... uh... may not be covered in
The 9-11 report in Popular Mechanics.
I'm sure it goes beyond these 16 things, but it'll be an opportunity to say what you want to say.
I'm not afraid of anybody or anything.
And what I tell you is what I believe to be the truth.
And I frequently then, of course, will get, well, gee, you can believe in all kinds of other things, like UFOs.
Well, and I do believe in UFOs, because I've seen one.
But I don't think I've ever told you, I believe absolutely, because I don't, that what I saw was an alien craft.
I've said again and again and again, people don't listen because they hear what they want to hear, that it was either an alien craft or it was a U.S.
military test aircraft.
Either way, I've said it's a big damn story.
It is a big story.
But it doesn't mean that I 100% believe there are aliens.
I don't know.
Till I see one myself.
I've seen an unidentified flying object.
That much I can personally attest to.
The rest of it, I know.
But, I will allow people to come on the program and say what they like, and you, many times, in rebuttal, what you would like.
That's the kind of open forum this has always been, and remains.
And again, I feel that having this guest on tonight Uh, is no different than having Alex, uh, Jones on by himself, or Mr. Van Clyst by himself, or any of the others that George has had on with that point of view.
And with that in mind, this program owes the audience, uh, perhaps, uh, from my point of view, a little sanity.
Uh, all that said, here we go.
Open lines.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello?
Hello?
Hello.
Yes, hi.
You're on the air, my dear.
Where are you calling from?
State College, Pennsylvania.
Welcome.
Hi.
Hi.
I just have a question about the molten steel.
Well, go.
You're a little early.
I mean, the guy to really answer this is about to be on the air.
But what is your question?
Well, the pools of molten steel were burning 70 feet below the street level for about 100 days after 9-11.
And jet fuel burns off within a couple of minutes.
And so, that's why we saw the black plumes of smoke rising, because the fires were starving.
My question is, if it takes 5,182 degrees Fahrenheit to make steel into a liquid molten state, then I would like to know how hydrocarbon fires, which can't burn in an oxygen-starved environment, as these underground fires did, how this could have happened.
How does he explain the pools of molten steel burning 70 feet below street level?
All right, I can assure you we're going to get to all of that.
We're going to get to all of that.
We're going to talk about the temperature that steel will begin to melt at, and more importantly, we're going to talk about the temperature at which steel will begin to weaken.
Right.
And they're very different temperatures.
Oh, I know that.
I know that.
You know, we've discussed this at length in 9-11 on trial.
Victor Thorne's book, and also you could ask him too, the collapses of the towers defy Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies, and also Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion.
The second tower defies Isaac Newton's Law of Motion.
The cap of that tower tipped to the east 23 degrees past vertical.
And then reversed direction and then fell vertically into its own footprint.
And if gravity is the only force acting upon that up there, then what was that?
I'll try and remember those things to ask when... Can I fast blast those to you?
Well, of course.
Okay.
Alright, do that and that'll help me remember.
Alright, coming up in a moment.
You'll just stay right where you are.
It's going to get pretty rough around here.
Ben Chertoff is coming up.
He's the top dog in this category for a magazine that I've always enjoyed, Popular Mechanics, and we're going to talk about 9-11 from a scientific perspective.
we'll be right back I'm not a fan of the way you talk
but I am a fan I am in only half of what I am
so please read them my heart is on fire
I'm not a fan of the way you talk but I am a fan
no no no no no no no
I'll tell you what's wrong before I get off the floor
don't bring me down you're always talking about your crazy nights
why everyday you complicate it right don't bring me down
I don't know know know Don't break me down
I'll tell you what's wrong before I get off the ground Don't break me down
Don't break me down Don't break me down
Don't break me down Looking good just like a stick in the grass. What a big
deal, you're gonna break your glass.
Don't bring me down. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Do Talk With Art Bell.
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worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Oh baby, here they come. Darren in Lansing, Michigan writes, Hey Art, you're really brilliant
to insult your listeners, aren't you?
Keep calling those of us names who believe September 11th was a U.S.
government operation.
Insulting your listeners is a sure way to keep folks tuning in.
Oh, nonsense, Darren!
That's nothing but a few out there with IQs approaching that of a, I don't know, an eggplant or something.
And if they're gone, It won't be a substantive part of the audience at all.
We'll be right back.
All right, here we go.
As research editor for Popular Mechanics, Benjamin Chertoff is responsible for upholding journalistic standards for the magazine, as well as ensuring all the stories in Popular Mechanics are reported completely and accurately.
He is the senior reporter for the magazine's special March feature, 9-11 Debunking the Myths, managing a team of dogged and intrepid professional researchers and reporters.
Before he joined Popular Mechanics in the summer of 2004, Ben worked as a freelance reporter and researcher for a number of large circulation magazines and publications, most notably Men's Journal, where he specialized in verifying And bolstering reportage from the early days of the Iraq War.
In addition to his reporting, Ben has written extensively about health and science news, as well as general interest features and profiles.
And where I feel we should begin is with this article.
And so what I'm going to do, Ben, is I'm going to read it on the air, and then let you respond to it before we even get started, all right?
That would be fine, Art.
Good.
All right, here we go.
Let's see.
Headline on this Rents site, Bell hosts Popular Mechanics MAG 9-11 debunker.
Saturday, March 5th.
As your Coast to Coast network website says about the upcoming Art Bell Show, research editor for Popular Mechanics magazine, Ben Chertoff, will discuss the 16 most prevalent claims made by conspiratorial theorists regarding 9-11 And how the staff of Popular Mechanics debunked each of them.
Cousin of Michael Chertoff.
Because Benjamin Chertoff is a cousin of Michael Chertoff, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, a massive bureaucratic security agency created as a result of 9-11, I'd like to ask you a few questions.
Do you condone the flagrant and undemocratic nepotism of the Bush administration?
For example, this Chertoff connection.
Whereby a senior government official's cousin has written a propaganda piece supporting the government's seriously flawed and incomplete investigation of the events of 9-11.
This is the kind of thing that Saddam Hussein was known for.
This is not very American and at all honest journalism.
Will you ask Ben Chertoff about the journalistic ethics practiced by Hearst Corporation and Popular Mechanics, in which a cousin of the Homeland Security czar has produced a major propaganda piece in Popular Mechanics which clearly seeks to discredit the citizens 9-11 investigation and calls serious researchers like myself, Eric Shumfield, David von Kleist, liars and extremists.
Will you ask Ben, Popular Mechanics' senior researcher, about how Secondary fires, in other words, burning office furniture, supplies, and paper, induced the collapse of the Twin Towers as a FEMA building performance study conducted by a team headed by Dr. Gene Corley during one week concluded, including the complete collapse of the tower's 47 central columns, source, executive summary by Gene Corley, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I would advise you to ask him why the Windsor Building in Madrid Endured a 24-hour inferno with temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius without collapsing on February 12, 13, 2005.
Will you, on Coast to Coast Radio, ask Ben about his relationship with his cousin Michael Chertoff?
and we also ask about mike's dual national status as an israeli national
by virtue of the fact that his mother was a first hostess with israel's hell
l airlines and a facade operative
in nineteen forty nine and fifty uh... during operation magic carpet
ben's mom told me that and is a cousin of michael chirtoff the
uh... secretary of uh...
d h s ben's mom judy dargan can be reached in uh... column new york where ben graduated from high school
in nineteen Judy told me that Ben's dad is Larry Chertoff.
I think he's a senior executive with the New York EPA and deals with water issues, but I haven't confirmed that.
For more information about Benjamin Chertoff and his ties to Michael Chertoff, and Michael's ties to Israel, and the Mossad, please read the following.
9-11 and Chertoff.
Cousin wrote 9-11 propaganda for PM.
Controlled Press hides Chertoff's Israeli roots.
Will Art Bell ask Ben Chertoff about his ties to DHS?
That pretty well covers it.
He does say, Mr. Bell, I'll be listening.
If you fail to openly address and discuss these essential and troublesome facts, I will be forced to accept the conclusion that you are also part of the 9-11 cover-up.
Respectively, Christopher Bullitt.
Ben, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me here.
Now, let's address some of what was said in this panicked piece that was put up so quickly on the website.
Sure.
Where would you like to begin?
I just read the whole thing.
I mean, what's true and what's false?
Well, I'll tell you, I never thought I'd be compared to Uday and Kuse.
Yeah, that was a little rough.
I'm not sure if I'd wear that as a badge of honor.
Well, I mean, first of all, my connection to Michael Chertoff.
I found out who Michael Chertoff was actually after we had shipped this piece when I read the New York Times.
Of course, in magazines, typically, you're working a month or two months before.
Now, wait a minute.
You didn't even find out that you were related to Michael?
I didn't know who Michael Chertoff was until the piece went to press, and I saw my last name on the cover of the New York Times, and of course it's not a very common last name, so it jumps out at you on the subway.
So what did you do?
Call mom and say, hey mom, what's the deal?
Well, actually I called my father and we chatted about it, and there aren't many Chertoffs, it's a very uncommon name, so in all likelihood there probably is a relation.
I don't know if that's the case, I don't know.
Oh, you mean you're not even absolutely positive?
No, not at all.
I mean, we traced our family tree back as far as we could.
If there is a connection, it's probably in 19th century Belarus, where the family sort of split into two groups, and they didn't talk ever since.
I see.
If I am a cousin, and what my mother had said on the phone after Chris Bolan had tracked her down and called numerous times, what she did say was that she thought I might be a distant cousin.
Of course, that has turned into direct cousins.
Never met him, never spoken to him.
And the Mossad thing?
You're going to have to ask Michael Chertoff.
I see.
I have no idea.
Man, I'll tell you, all kinds of articles on that Rent site are do this, do that.
God, I'm sick of it.
All right, all right, let's get down.
Having disposed with that then, let's get down to business here.
I mean, first of all, even if you are related and you're still not sure, you didn't find out until after you dealt with this article anyway.
Yeah, it was as we were going to press with it.
So, there you go.
Alright, so, what made you and or Popular Mechanics decide to pursue this madness anyway?
Well, what happened was, This is going back to October when the idea came up.
We opened up the New York Times one day, and there was a half-page ad.
In fact, I think there were a number of ads.
I think this was actually a full-page ad for one of the groups out in California.
I think it's Reopen911.org.
I might be mixing that up.
But there was an ad for a book called Painful Questions, and it listed on this advertisement All these anomalies in the physics of the collapse of the World Trade Center.
And they cited these as things that the media, the mainstream media, was ignoring.
And these were important questions that needed to be asked.
And they all fit within popular mechanics, into what we do, into our field of expertise.
Magazine has 102 years history reporting on military affairs, reporting on engineering, And we'll get to that.
The bottom line is, though, that Popular Mechanics dealt with this kind of thing.
It had access to the scientists.
for instance, that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel.
So how could jet fuel have been responsible for melting steel in the World Trade Center?
And we'll get to that.
The bottom line is, though, that Popular Mechanics dealt with this kind of thing.
It had access to the scientists. It had access to engineers.
And so you could actually take the evidence and really submit it to the real people here.
Exactly.
They said that the mainstream media was ignoring it, and we looked at ourselves and thought, well, I guess we're the mainstream media, and let's ask those questions.
Let's investigate it.
All right.
When did that begin?
How long ago?
I guess we started the reporting back in either October.
It was early November when we had a team assembled, and we started going out and actually picking stuff apart.
And it ran all the way through mid-January as we were going to press.
I guess it was earlier than that.
Ben, how did you decide on what the 16 most important claims to investigate would be?
What we did was we looked through a lot of website searches and got Thierry Meisson's book and got the Painful Questions book.
Uh, read through all the literature and watched the DVDs and tried to pick out not only what we saw repeated the most, because we wanted to have claims that represented what was out there.
The most common 16 claims, but also the most plausible, because a lot of them can, uh, a lot of the claims are sort of at face value, pretty, uh, pretty counterintuitive.
So we chose the ones that seemed like there could be truth there, and we picked the ones that we saw the most.
Okay.
Alright, and so, web research, and getting the books, probably in plain sight as well.
Absolutely, we watched it.
Absolutely.
A number of times.
Alright, good.
Because, another one I got said, oh, you know, if you haven't seen plain sight art, then you're not going to be qualified to be interviewing Ben.
So anyway, we've got, let's start.
Let's just go through all damn 16 of them.
This is long-form talk radio.
We've got the time to do it.
Great.
Let's go through each and every one of them.
Great.
Alright?
So, start wherever you want to.
Well, we've got, I mean, we can go in the order of the magazine, or we can, any way you want.
All right, let's go with the magazine.
I've got it right in front of me.
The pod question.
Yeah, the pod theory shows up a lot.
What is the pod theory?
Well, there are a number of different variations on the pod theory, but essentially it focuses on what people have seen in these low-resolution stills of the plane flying into the South Tower.
Because remember, there's very little footage of the plane flying into the North Tower.
So this is the plane that flew into the South Tower.
There's plenty of cameras that track this in.
It was on all the major networks.
They're taking, when you take a still image of these video shots, it appears in a couple of frames as the plane is flying in.
And you can watch it on the video, or you can see the freeze frames.
There is what looks like a bulge under the right wing of the It's sort of where the wing meets the fuselage of the 767 that flew into the South Tower.
And that has turned into all sorts of different things.
There are claims that it's a missile that is fired right as the plane impacts the South Tower.
Perhaps it's a military tanker plane, or it's a guidance system.
There are all sorts of different theories as to what this is.
So what we did was we took their evidence and the evidence that was on these sites and the evidence that's put out on the major conspiracy materials, and we sent both video stills and also the clearest picture we could find, the clearest still photo, which was a Rob Howard shot that originally appeared in New York Magazine.
It's a pretty It's an incredible photo of the plane about to hit the South Tower and we talked to Rob and we got the actual film and sent that off to imaging experts and actually to a number of imaging experts.
Is that the one you've got in the magazine here?
Yeah, that's at the opening spread.
That black and white photo, which I believe he didn't even know that the second plane was there.
He was running down the street and had taken the camera and shot it over his head and that was the photo that came from it.
We took the original film and the still footage from the original CNN feed and we sent them to as many imaging experts as we could and we found Ronald Greeley, who is at the He's at a Space Photography Laboratory at Arizona State University.
His area of expertise is taking images from NASA probes and from NASA satellites and identifying on planets from this video footage and from these images, based on the light formations and the shadows, what is actually on the surface.
Got it.
And it's a real science.
So, if anyone was qualified to do it, he was the one.
And he took a look at it and very quickly ran it through his own computer programs and looked at the, I believe he looked at the video footage itself.
And it turns out that there's nothing there because what happens is when you have a video still, the pixels end up getting exaggerated, especially when you blow it up and you try to sharpen it.
Oh, I know.
It's a very inexact science to try to analyze something from a video.
I know.
It's like trying to find stuff on Mars.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which is why we tried to focus on the photograph itself.
And when you look at the photograph and very quickly figured out that to a certain extent there's sun glint and also the plane is banked to the left.
The engine is to the right of where this pod is supposed to be.
And if you actually watch the footage in full motion You can see most of it is just a shadow from the engine as it's flying into the building.
But when you see it on the video there's this enlargement effect that happens from the video and that has turned into this pod.
So then in every way a standard 767?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And in the magazine, if you pick up a copy, you can see that we juxtaposed it next to a, I believe it's a picture of a Qantas Airlines 767.
So you can see that it's just the wing fairing that juts out.
The plane is on an angle on all the shots, so it's a little difficult to see, but it's a plane, United Airlines 767.
it's a bit of playing underline seven sixty seven
so hogwash no no no missile under their no
hardwood high explosives are on and what they thought it was
Something like that though, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And we also talked to experts at Boeing and we talked to a bunch of military and aviation experts about the possibility of even putting a pod on an airplane.
Yes.
Right there.
And the consensus was, why would you want to do that?
It would be a real pain to do that.
And you'd have to re-engineer the plane.
I think one of our experts had said, you know, it's not just like throwing a suitcase in the trunk.
These planes are very light.
They're very highly engineered.
And to hang something heavy off the bottom of a plane would take an enormous amount of restructuring of the actual wing.
Even so, all of that said, your expert said, uh-uh.
Here's the evidence.
Here's the photograph.
There's no pod there.
There's no missile there.
There's nothing.
It's just a plane.
Absolutely conclusively.
All right.
A lot of people think that there was a secret order that went out from, I don't know, on high, that all of the U.S.
military on 9-11, when this began to happen, was ordered, ordered to stand down.
Now, that That that's to me crazy on the face of it I mean that that would involve everybody receiving orders at so many different places look we have this Horrible thing that we're about we the government are about to do and we're ordering you the military to not Raise one airplane or do anything to try and stop these airplanes that are going to destroy Landmarks in New York and hit the Pentagon
We want you all to stand down and not send any jets up.
These people believe that, right?
Yep.
And of course it would take thousands of people to keep their mouths shut, right?
If such an order really went out.
All right.
Hold it right there, Ben.
We'll be right back.
Ben Chitoff is my guest.
And we're discussing 9-11.
Ben is from Popular Mechanics.
They would be the people who would know how to look into this.
So if you want to ignore this evidence, you do so at your own peril.
We'll discuss each and every one of these 16 probably more before the night is done.
Keep your dial right there.
Don't leave me this way.
I can't survive.
I can't stay alive without your love.
Don't you love her badly?
Don't you need her badly?
I can't exist, I'll surely miss your tender kiss Don't you love her badly? Don't you need her badly?
Don't you love her ways? Tell me what you say Don't you ever let me...
Wanna meet her daddy?
Don't you love her face?
Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
Like she did one thousand times before Don't you love her ways?
Tell me what you say Don't you love her as she's walking out the door?
All your love, all your love, all your love, all your love, all your love is gone
Just sing a lonely song, of a deep blue dream, seven horses singing to me on the morn
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
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his area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country Sprint Access number,
pressing option 5, and dialing toll free, 800-893-0903. From coast to coast, and worldwide
on the Internet, this is Art Bell.
Tonight Ben Chertoff is here from Popular Mechanics and he's talking about the science
of the collapse of the buildings in the United States.
In New York, and the Pentagon as well, and a whole lot of other things that are involved in the... I don't know.
The crazy claims out there.
We'll get back to them one by one in a moment.
You know, a lot of these are technical claims made, and we're going to deal with those, but you know, to me it's embarrassing that the second biggest claim would be no stand-down order that our military had been virtually told to keep all the planes on the ground and not challenge people who are about to blow up our Higher buildings.
But nevertheless, there it is.
No stand-down order.
Deal with that one, Ben.
Well, this is one of my favorite pieces.
It's incredibly complicated.
And to a certain extent, it's one of the more compelling claims that you see bounced around.
It's sort of the basis of the whole theory.
I mean, if the government was going to make this happen, then there would have to be some sort of stand-down.
It's sort of the be-all, end-all theory.
But, and also it shows, I mean, a lot of these conspiracies, they have such animosity towards the government, yet have this assumption that everything in the government is going to work like clockwork.
You know, if a plane is off course for just a second, it's going to be immediately intercepted by fighter jets.
Which of course, on the morning of September 11th, was not the case.
NORAD, which is the North American Air Defense Command, which is the military body that is responsible for protecting U.S.
and Canadian airspace.
That was set up during the Cold War, and the infrastructure of NORAD was looking outwards for threats.
They had radar stations that rung the coast.
I mean, since September 11th, of course, this has all been changed quite drastically.
Of course, but prior to September 11th... On that morning, yeah, exactly.
On that morning, they had radar stations ringing the coast.
There was no radar coverage inside.
They relied on air traffic control to vector their fighter planes.
And they only had, in all of North America, 20 planes on alert.
In the U.S., in the contiguous 48 states, there were only 14 fighter jets on alert.
Two up in Otis Air Force Base.
I mean, in terms of the ones that were close to the World Trade Center, there were two up in Otis Air Force Base.
And of course, once the hijackings occurred, air traffic control for a long time was scratching their heads.
They didn't know what was going on, because if you talked to the FAA guys, of course we talked.
They were like our best friends at one point, because we were on the phone almost every day with a new set of questions.
And talk to the air traffic controllers, and also talk to the guys over at NORAD.
Before September 11th, if you had simultaneous loss of transponder and radio contact, that meant one thing, and that was that the plane had crashed.
So there was an initial lag time there, and NORAD got warning.
I mean, the air traffic control literally had to pick up the phone and call NORAD directly and say, listen, there's something screwy with this plane, because they were able to Briefly pick it up on their primary radar, air traffic control was, and said, you know, I think we have a hijack situation.
And of course, there hadn't been a domestic hijack.
I think there might have been, I think it was 91 or perhaps before, but I'm pretty confident that in that decade before 9-11, there hadn't been any domestic hijacks.
And NORAD was postured to intercept planes coming in from the coast.
Well, we're getting a lot of static on this line for some reason.
Are we?
I don't know.
I'm not surprised.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
We'll live with it or establish a new connection in a bit here.
So, keeping in mind, NORAD at that time, pre-911, was looking outward for threats, not at domestic air travel, not NORAD.
Exactly.
That wasn't their job.
And if you remember, before 9-11 and after the Cold War, NORAD was, to a certain extent, fighting for their existence.
And there was a lot of lobbying in Congress that you've got this expensive sort of dinosaur agency out in Cheyenne Mountain that's, you know, tracking Soviet bombers that don't exist anymore.
I mean, they had their big PR campaign.
They do this every year, which is tracking Santa Claus.
They tried to reposture themselves as an agency to assist with domestic threats, such as drug runners coming into the country.
So they did, from time to time, track drug runners.
Of course, those were all coming over the borders and into the U.S.
But that morning, they only had, and this is, again, change.
There were only 14 fighters on alert.
There were two up in Otis.
They were called.
They, of course, did scramble.
And you have to understand there have been all these reports that came out and all these claims that, you know, there are hundreds of Air Force bases with fighter jets.
Much closer.
But the important fact to remember is you can't get a fighter jet in the air right away.
It's not like going out to the garage and turning on your car.
No, we could only talk about the ones that were on alert.
Getting out.
Yeah, exactly.
A fighter jet on alert is fueled.
It's ready to go.
It's armed.
It's ready to fly.
Got it.
So of those... Of those, 14.
in the u.s. there were only on the eastern seaboard within range of
washington in new york
there were only five uh... officially there had to be to i mean i had to be
for on alert they happen to be an extra one at langley there were three
down there after we talked to you
the guys down at langley uh... that was not an unusually small amount
uh... at that time to be on alert now that was that was what was required
That was the standard operating procedure before 9-11.
When you think about it in the pre-September 11th mindset, why would you have more on alert?
What they would do is oftentimes, during the Cold War, intercept Soviet bombers.
Those were from bases mostly up in Canada.
But there was no perceived need to have more than 14.
All right, so who was actually scrambled?
Who got where?
Well, what they did was Northeast Air Defense Sector.
NORAD is divided into smaller segments, but Northeast Air Defense Sector, which is up in, I believe it's up in New York, upstate New York.
Boston Air Traffic Control, Boston Center, called NEANF and said, We've got a problem.
You guys should scramble flights.
So they scrambled.
But the problem is, standard operating procedure for NORAD, and this is still the case today, when you scramble a jet, the pilots are told to take off and they're not given a location.
They're told to get to the air, they're vectored out to a holding pattern, usually offshore, to keep them outside of the domestic traffic patterns.
Because you remember that civilian airspace is extremely crowded.
And of course, air traffic control has sovereignty over, I mean, civilian air traffic control has sovereignty over all of the civilian airspace, so they would be vectored usually offshore to kind of hang there, and then told where to go.
Now, at that point, they had had advance warning on one plane, and that was the plane that, I believe it was the plane that hit the North Tower.
New York Air Traffic Control finally spotted United Airlines Flight 175, which is the plane that hit the South Tower.
By this point... No, I'm sorry, I mixed that up slightly.
No, they were informed that Flight 11 was hijacked.
And then there was... I mean, you have to understand that as a civilian air traffic controller, having never had a situation like this before, It was very confusing.
Sure was.
I heard there was a great deal of confusion.
Absolutely, because you're sitting there at your radar screen and you think the plane's crashed, and then you see that it's not crashed.
I think the hijackers actually turned off the transponders, right?
Exactly.
So they drop off the regular computer screens.
Yeah, the way air traffic control radar works, and this is something that's always glossed over, and it seems to the sort of Hollywood It's a movie example.
It's a very elegant radar system where you can pinpoint what you're looking at and the computer knows what it is.
Because they're actively transmitting.
That's how transponders work, exactly.
It'll tell you the altitude, because remember, you're looking at a two-dimensional screen, so you'll see the altitude, you'll see where the flight's coming from, where it's going to, what flight number it is, what the airline is, and some other information.
When you turn off the transponder, you have to rely on primary radar.
And the way radar systems work that day at most of the air traffic control systems is that you couldn't see primary radar returns, which is actually radar from bouncing out the plane and coming back.
You couldn't see that on the same screen that you could see the transponders.
Understood.
So you'd have to switch screens, and that led to an enormous amount of confusion.
And of course, when you get out over Ohio, and this was the issue later in the day, With Flight 77 and then Flight 93, the primary radar coverage isn't that good.
Because, and it is not, I mean, the way the primary radar works is it's a stacked and sort of pancaked system.
So you have certain air traffic control centers can see certain airspace, but they can't see below that.
So the planes were not, I mean, nobody had thought that this would ever happen.
It hadn't happened before.
there hadn't been a case where a plane had lost a transponder and radio contact.
And so, to a certain extent, these guys were left to improvise and to find it as well as
they could.
But they did call NORAD.
They did call NORAD several times.
They did.
And they called also for Flight 11.
At one point, they thought it was going to Washington because they didn't know where
it was headed.
And then New York Center, which is New York Terminal Approach.
I'm sorry, not New York Center, but New York Terminal Approach, JFK, actually called NEADS.
And this is outside of the chain of command.
This is completely outside of the chain of command.
They were just picking up the phone and dialing the number.
Because there was really no precedent for this.
None whatsoever.
So they were picking up the phone, a regular old phone, and calling NORAD and saying, hey, trouble here.
Anyway, we've got to jump to it.
What happened to the Well, what happened was they ended up out in a holding pattern right over the Atlantic Ocean off of Long Island, because nobody knew where these planes were.
Because NORAD didn't have its own system of radar that could see effectively inside that air corridor, especially when you get into western New York.
These planes are being held out there.
If they're going to be vectored in after a flight, they're going to be vectored in by air traffic control because they're flying in one of the busiest air corridors in the country.
So they're hanging out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Air traffic control is scrambling to try to find these flights.
They couldn't find the flights.
Did they ever get vectored?
Eventually, they were brought into New York City, and that was after the second tower was hit.
Of course, it happened in quick succession.
And it took a while for the news to filter back.
There is no command center here where everyone knew everything that was going on.
Understood.
The accusation that there was a stand-down order is ludicrous.
It is absolutely ludicrous.
And besides, at that point, you also have to remember that These planes were flying under a rule of engagement, and this goes way back to the Constitution, that the military can't police the civilians of the U.S.
These planes were under posse comitatus, and they couldn't fire on the jets that flew into the World Trade Center.
The only time those rules of engagement were changed was later in the day, when I believe You know, Ben, of all these claims, the only one that I was ever tempted to believe could be true was the thing on Flight 93.
out there with which you know that of all these of all these claims the only one that i was ever tempted to
believe could be true was
the thing on flight ninety three i i thought you know if it was shot down
hard as it might be i would understand a presidential decision to do that at that
point so i didn't rule out the possibility that could be shot down that
uh... perhaps nothing was said about it i i I thought, well, that one might be logical, but that's not what happened, is it?
No, it's not, and it's funny, I felt exactly the same way when we started working on this, and I had this suspicion that, like, you know, we went into this trying to find out if there was any truth, because that would have been the scoop of the century, if there had been truth in any of these.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
I mean, that would have been what every journalist prays for.
It would have been bigger than Woodward and Bernstein, of course.
But going into investigating Flight 93, I thought personally, and I think a bunch of us thought, there might be some truth there, because it does make sense.
The order had been given.
The authority was there.
But as we started to really go through the evidence, and a lot of these claims that, for instance, there was a white jet in the area, that the debris field was 8 miles long, and there were human remains far away, the way that you read it, because this was coming from news reports that came out that day, and the day after, when everyone was in a state of massive confusion, You read those, and there's no direction attached to it.
It's tough to infer sort of where the plane was, where this debris was.
And also, it's just the very nature of the news cycle is that these reports that come out initially are going to be updated and revised as the news cycle goes on.
I mean, it doesn't mean that the news is lying, but it means that the daily newspapers, I mean, they did an incredible Herculean effort reporting this stuff.
The nature of the day was that they didn't have all the information all the time, and so as time goes on, this stuff gets revised and updated.
Of course, those aren't cited in any of these conspiracy theories.
Those are sort of forgotten about.
But as we went into Flight 93, what we had to do first, and this is when sort of everything fell into place, was make a map, figure out where the debris actually landed.
One of the theories was that there's this piece of engine, and if you look at the news reports that came out around the time of September 11th and the days following, that there's this engine that was variously placed at 6 miles away, at a mile away, at 9,000 yards away.
And the theory is that a heat-seeking missile had hit the engine, which knocked it off, knocks it off way down the flight path, and then the plane goes for a while.
But the truth is, I guess, when a plane hits at 500 miles an hour, the engine, with a lot of weight, goes sailing, right?
Exactly, and that's not uncommon.
We talked to a whole bunch of crash investigators, and they've seen this happen before.
They've actually seen an engine go much farther, in a case in Alaska.
I mean, the point is, the NTSB investigators are nothing unusual here.
The plane was coming in somewhere between 500 and 600 miles an hour, and it crashed in a space of 30 feet.
You've got the engine, which is extremely dense.
One of the engines eroded into the ground.
Rolled along, down a hill, into a catchment basin, and it's directly in line with where the flight is going.
Isn't there audio, plenty of audio, or at least quite a bit of audio evidence of people on cell phones with relatives and others describing that the passengers were going to take control of this airplane?
I mean, was that wrong?
No, that was absolutely true.
I mean, there was plenty of audio evidence.
People are making calls from the air phones.
They have recordings of this.
We've all heard them.
You know, we've gone through the transcripts, and there is some confusion.
It seems now to be the case that they didn't quite make it to the cockpit, that they were about to bust the cockpit door open, and then the hijackers themselves drove the plane in because they knew that they were going to get Overwhelmed by the passengers behind them.
Well, however it happened, though, there's nothing to take away from the heroic actions of those passengers, as we understand them.
You didn't find anything in your investigation that takes away from that, did you?
No, none whatsoever.
In fact, Flight 93 was... When we went through this, it was the one that... At first, we thought, this is the one that's plausible and we're probably going to find something.
And then it was... And then it was also the...
section that just very quickly uh... that the people of the on the plate very quickly with
obvious that uh... there was no chance of shopping
so you were actually approaching doing the story then with a pretty clear
open-minded uh... in that you would be even thought the same thing i did about
this flight that it did it could have been shot down and what a horrible
decision it would have been but a big story to uncover to be sure and you
you would have uncovered it and told that story if it really was that way
Absolutely, and that's the case for the rest of the entire article.
I mean, imagine if any of these were true.
That would be huge.
It would be huge, yes, of course it would.
It's the scoop we all dream about as journalists, but the fact of the matter is they just weren't.
When we come back, we need to talk about melted steel.
That's a central I'm part of all this business, so, and, you know, temperatures and all of that, all right?
All right.
Great.
Good.
All right.
Hold it right there.
From the high deserts, my guest is Ben Chertoff from Popular Mechanics Magazine.
They would indeed be the right people to go to the engineers, the stress guys, the people who construct buildings, scientists who can look at the evidence, video people and picture people.
Who can see if that pod really was there, and when we come back, one of the central parts of what the conspiracy people are saying, that that steel just could not have melted.
It simply could not have melted, and it should have been standing after that jet fuel burn.
when we come back.
Thank you.
Bye.
keep moving.
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You know, what I really should have done is done tonight just purely with Ben, and then tomorrow night taking calls for Ben.
Because it's going to be that big.
I know that.
that we're never gonna have time to get everything and get calls to but we're
gonna try so stay put some of the conspiracy loonies really ought to have to read
this the way they demand that that we read uh... there and watch their dvds
and so forth Popular Mechanics.
My guest is Ben Chertoff.
Ben, we're going to have to hurry through some of this.
We need a lot more hours, and even if I had them, we still wouldn't be even, believe me, with the number of hours devoted to the other side on coast.
Nevertheless, let's hit some high points.
Jet fuel not hot enough to melt steel.
They make lots of noise about that one.
Yeah, that's a big one that's everywhere, and that was on that full-page ad that we saw that really set the whole thing in motion.
Well, it turns out that's true.
Jet fuel doesn't necessarily burn hot enough to melt steel, but the point is, steel doesn't need to melt to have a collapse like we saw on September 11th.
Oh?
Yeah!
And if you actually get into the engineering of steel, you learn that it's a very interesting building material.
We talked to numerous firefighters and engineers on this.
One who is the Deputy Chief of the New York City Fire Department.
He mentioned, he actually wrote the book, Collapse of Burning Buildings.
He said he'd never seen melted steel in a building fire, at least right when they put the fire out.
But what he had seen was a lot of twisted and warped steel.
And the way steel works is, first of all, it is a very good conductor of heat, which is why you have fireproofing on tall buildings.
Of course, yes.
And of course, the World Trade Center had spray on fireproofing.
And when steel gets hot, and what happened when the planes hit it was that, first of all, it knocked out a lot of the exterior facade, which was structural to that building, which was very unique to its construction, especially for the time it was built.
And it took out some of the interior columns.
What happens when the steel gets hot, the fireproofing is knocked off.
You only need fireproofing knocked off in a small place for the heat to start to transfer to the entire beam.
As steel gets hot, it doesn't melt, but what happens is, well, you get hot enough it'll melt, but what happens in a fire is it expands on both ends, and it also softens.
But the most important thing... So, it bends?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And it becomes softer, and it loses its structural integrity.
And you've got to realize that these buildings are put together very carefully and very tightly, so that when you've got structural components that are changing shape, They're expanding.
It's going to do quite a bit to the structural integrity of the building itself.
But one of the most important takeaways from the whole thing is that the jet fuel didn't burn for that long.
What happened was the planes went in, the jet fuel burned for about 10 minutes, and you had this very intense heat for 10 minutes, and that set everything else that was on those floors on fire.
And so you've got that fire.
And that burned for quite a while, until the towers actually collapsed.
You mean like all the furniture and the office, everything?
Exactly.
Furniture, computers, desks, carpets, drapes.
And that reached what kind of temperature?
Well, it probably reached around 1,800 degrees.
1,800.
All right, so the steel then begins to bend, and then the floors start to pancake, and you had some engineering looks at that right on pancaking floors and the
the stresses once one floor bangs down on on the next exactly exactly what happens if you have this
this massive heat and it's gonna soften and it and it worked differently
we we're lucky enough to work pretty closely with the the National Institute of Standards and Technology and they
had the luxury of almost two years and a lot of funding
in time to go through and to pick up where the FEMA report left off
Many of these conspiracy theories cite the FEMA report as proof that there's a cover-up because it was so abbreviated and short and they only worked on it for a limited amount of time.
But what's important to remember is the FEMA report was a preliminary report And the NIST investigation is huge, and they had a lot of time to go through this.
And what they did was they built literally a replica of some of the office floors in the Trade Center.
Right.
And using computer modeling, they figured out where the fuel went when the planes hit.
And so they were able to spray fuel into the building, into their model, at places that it would have gone in the actual buildings.
And then they lit the whole thing on fire.
And the result?
What they found was that the steel weakened significantly, and they think that there were pockets of areas that were over 1800 degrees, and at that point steel has usually less than 10% of its structural strength.
Wow.
What happened, I know, it really did weaken it, and it's a combination.
What brought the towers down wasn't just the fire, and it wasn't just the impact of the planes, but it was a combination of the both.
Because when the planes hit, there was brand fireproofing that was knocked off, which let the steel become vulnerable to the heat.
And it also knocked out some of the structure of the building itself, so it didn't need as much heat to bring it down.
So no mainstream people you talked to at all went along with this planted explosives theory?
No, none whatsoever.
We talked to, I mean, in terms of structural engineers and even explosives experts, we talked to, had to be at least 30 top structural engineers, those who had worked on the investigation and those completely independent of the investigation.
We couldn't find one person who would believe that they were not one.
Yeah, in fact, all the evidence points, there are oceans of evidence that point to the contrary.
And the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is it?
Yes.
Yes.
A very, very reputable group of scientists.
In other words, they proved that's what brought the buildings down.
Yeah, that is.
And, you know, they weren't even looking into it.
I mean, the purpose of their investigation wasn't to say whether it was, you know, bombs or an airplane.
But because from the outset, the evidence, even before you investigated it, is overwhelmingly on the side of what we saw happening that day.
And they had the time, and they proved pretty conclusively what had happened.
What are the puffs of dust supposed to mean to these conspiracy theorists?
Well, that goes into the theory that there were explosives actually planted in the building, and there are many different takes on this theory.
The idea being that the plane flying in was sort of the cover And then the explosives, these, you know, controlled demolition, I've heard them called squids, were placed strategically throughout the building to ensure that they came down, and also, you know, to make sure that it came down very neatly, so that there wasn't damage to the surrounding areas, so that Wall Street wasn't wiped out.
It gets very complex.
And so, as you watch the videos and the replays of the building's collapse, you can see As they start to collapse, there are areas where dust and debris is ejected forcibly outside of the building.
Yes.
Out of the windows.
Yes.
I mean, it literally are the windows breaking, and that has led to the idea that those are demolition squibs.
Those are controlled demolitions.
But in fact, they were what?
Well, you have to realize that most of an office building, and the World Trade Center included, is air, because you've got these massive open floor office spaces.
So what happened is, as one floor is slamming down on the other, you've got this enormous over-pressurization of the floor.
Of course.
So all of the air has to go somewhere.
Blows out the windows.
Exactly, it blew out the windows.
And that's what it is.
So you could, I suppose you could cite it as evidence of explosives, but in fact it was one floor collapsing upon the next, and of course it's going to create overpressure and blow out the windows, and that's what did it.
Exactly, exactly.
It's really the simple answer that answers this question.
No plane debris at the Pentagon.
Let's jump over there very quickly.
This one I've heard, on my other people challenge me uh... there's no plane they say that hit the pentagon this is ridiculous there were no plane parts there uh... and then i usually ask the personal and okay
What happened to that airplane and all those people?
And they say, well, we don't know.
Maybe it flew by and something else, a missile hit it or whatever.
So deal with the Pentagon thing.
That's one of the most widespread theories.
Yes.
It came out in Thierry Meisson's book, The Big Lie, which was actually a bestseller in France for a period of time.
The no-plane theory comes from this perceived lack of debris.
And of course, The World Trade Center was very well covered by the media.
The Pentagon is a much more secure location.
There are very few, many fewer cameras there.
Of course.
You can't really get up close.
And also, just the nature of the crash.
I mean, the planes that hit the World Trade Center were hitting into a, at that level, it's fairly thin steel.
The Pentagon is made out of reinforced concrete.
And when a plane hits it, a plane is very, very thin aluminum.
And the plane isn't going to leave a cartoon cutout of itself.
There's not going to be a plane that's just sitting there intact.
I mean, the thing was coming in upwards of 500 miles an hour and hit reinforced concrete.
It literally disintegrated.
It also hit part of the ground first, apparently, right?
Exactly.
That's the big thing about the size of the hole in the Pentagon.
Right.
The size is too small.
What happened was one of the wings hit the ground.
And started to shear off.
And of course, as the body of the plane went into the Pentagon, the wings, which are even lighter and filled with fluid, became almost a liquid-like state and flew in and had already sheared off at this point.
Right.
So what you have is this very compact, what does, you know, to a certain extent, resemble a missile.
Of course, it's a passenger jet.
That's what actually entered the Pentagon.
And of course, they did find the plane.
Part of it was halfway into the basement at the end, and it was compacted into about 20 feet.
And there was also enormous amounts of small debris littering along the Pentagon.
Photographs of that.
And not only photographs, but eyewitness testimony of people who said they were holding plane pieces in their hand.
Exactly.
And other evidence that some people were, I don't know, I guess, Shocked to even film?
Yeah, you know, it's a tragedy and it's very gruesome.
And talking to people who had been there that really came out on the phone that, I mean, these people found body parts.
They found the black box.
I mean, there is just an enormous wealth of physical evidence that screams There was a Boeing that hit the Pentagon.
With all of that, why do they still maintain that it was some sort of missile and that this plane somehow mysteriously disappeared?
Then, I think there is another theory that all the people were shepherded who would have been on these planes into some other plane to be killed, American citizens.
Isn't there something like that?
Yeah, it's called the Bumble Plane Theory.
We didn't so much get into that.
The idea is that And there are different takes on this, that it was at Newbury, that it was at Otis, there are all sorts of different Air Force bases that are cited, that there's a point where two of the flight paths cross each other, so the idea is that there they landed, they herded all the passengers onto Flight 93, and then Flight 93 was shot down to destroy that evidence, because there's this sort of perceived conspiracy about the lack of the planes being completely filled.
Of course, that's a normal occurrence in airlines.
But, you know, taken out of context, it's used as evidence that this was all planned from the beginning.
Fit everyone on to Flight 93.
I hear you.
The World Trade Center, Building 7.
Now, that one seemed strange to me at the time, a little bit.
I didn't understand the whole thing either.
I mean, the two buildings came down, and then later, another building came down that wasn't hit by an airplane.
They make a big deal out of that, right?
Right, and that seems to be the one that, at the end, they'll say, well, okay, fine, all the other stuff, whatever, but you have to admit that the World Trade Center 7 was brought down with a controlled demolition.
A lot of that stems from the FEMA report, because the Federal Emergency Management Agency didn't have much time to spend on World Trade Center 7, and they didn't do much investigating.
Of course, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is now working on that, and we were able to talk to their researchers about what they believe happened.
And?
Well, it turns out that the damage to the building facade, and they were able to piece this together from the evidence that was collected from Ground Zero.
Of course, that is indeed another conspiracy in itself, that all the steel was shipped overseas immediately afterwards.
I mean, of course, most of the steel was.
I mean, you had two buildings' worth of steel, but A lot of it was collected as evidence.
I mean, small pieces of it.
You don't need all this steel to do your investigation.
What happened was with World Trade Center 7, when the North Tower collapsed, an enormous amount of debris fell on the building itself and actually scooped out upwards of 25% of the south facade.
I just said, my God, that's already Well, there aren't many photos of the South Facade, which is the problem, because that was below where the World Trade Center was, and most of Lower Manhattan was uninhabitable.
You just couldn't get down there at that point.
But they were able to piece together that 25% of it was knocked out.
And of course, World Trade Center 7 itself was an unusual design.
It had these massive open floors, so you had many, many thousands of square feet of office space.
Um, without load bearing columns in between them, there were fewer, fewer columns carrying load.
And so knocking out a couple of those really destabilized the entire building.
And as you watch these videos of the building, you can see, and they were able to, this was able to chart exactly how the collapse happened.
Some of the interior portions on the eastern south face of the building were knocked out.
Of course, a fire raged in there for seven hours.
Most of it fed from a pressurized diesel line from the basement, which was not available to the FEMA investigators.
They didn't know about this.
So that just fed the fire?
Exactly.
Hour after hour.
For seven hours.
And so you have one of the structural columns of the building on the east side.
breaks down and you can actually see before collapses uh...
when you look at the uh... from the photograph of the video footage and
witnessed it extensively you can see the penthouse drops away
uh... and they disappeared structure one after another and then you see the building starting to fall from
that he's side of the structure
uh... that falls first and then that pulled down the west side of the
structure all right good uh... back to the pentagon for a sec uh...
A lot of people also said that a lot of the windows, unbelievably, incredibly, simply could not be intact.
Those windows would have to be shattered.
Windows close to where, in fact, the plane entered the Pentagon.
But there's a reason why those windows didn't shatter, right?
Absolutely.
What is it?
They were made not to shatter, because they were blast-proof windows.
Remember, it's the Pentagon, folks.
And so what you have is this structural thing.
You have reinforced concrete, and then these windows are made of blast-resistant glass, which they had installed, I believe it was the summer beforehand.
We were able to talk to the guy who designed and installed these windows, and he said, you know, he was all said and done, it was a tragic day, but he had to, you know, he was kind of happy his windows held up.
And they were meant to withstand a blast like this, so they performed as they should.
Not all the windows survived.
Many of them broke, especially those immediately surrounding the crash.
Right.
But a lot of them also survived, and the reason for that is because they were blast windows, for what it's worth out there, folks.
Alright, the F-16 pilot, somebody, supposedly, I guess Alex Jones, supposedly interviewed a pilot who claimed that he shot down, or that he knew somebody, I'm sorry, he interviewed somebody who said he knew somebody who shot down Flight 93, is that correct?
That is.
And, you know, to Alex Jones' credit, he had a follow-up article on this, and he wasn't sure if this was true, but it got repeated all over the internet.
The first time it appeared was on the Alex Jones Show, with this retired Army colonel who said that he had met the guy who shot down Flight 93.
And then eventually it came out on LetsRoll911.org, That they named the pilot, and they named him as Major Rick Gibney.
Rick Gibney is actually Lieutenant Colonel Rick Gibney.
Not a major at all, but a lieutenant colonel.
He flies out of North Dakota, out of the 119th Air National Guard.
And of course, what is a National Guard pilot from North Dakota doing out in Pennsylvania shooting down Flight 93?
The 119th maintains a detachment at Langley, and those jets that were launched and scrambled that day actually were flying from the 119th.
But we went back to the 119th and talked to them and talked to Lt.
Kibney and talked to their press people there and went through their records, and it turns out, A, none of their planes got anywhere near Flight 93 because they were in a combat radius.
Over air combat patrol over Washington.
Yes.
And Rick Gibney, that morning, Ed Jacobi, who was the then director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, was out in Bozeman, Montana for a meeting of emergency managers.
He's the guy you need in New York, because you've got an emergency going on, and it was his job to coordinate the relief effort at Ground Zero.
Yep.
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Indeed so.
My guest is Ben Chertoff.
He's here explaining 9-11.
From the point of view of a Popular Mechanics investigative article, a very serious one, who went to scientists and stress engineers and those kinds of people about the claims made by conspiracy theorists about what brought down those buildings.
Once again, Ben Chertoff from Popular Mechanics.
Ben, the obvious thing to do would be to go to the Lieutenant Colonel and ask him if he shot down the plane, right?
Exactly.
That's what we did, and the answer was absolutely not.
Nobody from the 119th got anywhere near Flight 93.
What happened was, he flew out to Bozeman, Montana, where Ed Jacobi was.
He flew out in a modified two-seat F-16B, landed out in Bozeman.
They gave Ms.
Jacobi a quick brush-up on how to use the ejection seat, gave him a flight suit and a spare helmet.
And after about an hour of instruction, they both hopped in the F-16 and then flew cross-country and landed in New York, so that he'd come and run the relief effort at the World Trade Center site.
So yeah, he wasn't anywhere near Flight 93.
Look, we could go on and on and on and on, but we don't have the time.
I want to discuss a little bit the people.
That are making these claims.
I mean, obviously, in the course of doing this story, when it became known that you were doing this story, I'm sure... I mean, I read some emails at the beginning of the program.
Just a little, tiny sample of what's been sent to me.
These are really rabid folks.
And they call names, very serious, bad names.
You know, like traitor.
They use names like that.
And I wonder if in the course of this investigation, or even after the article came out, You have suffered the same sort of thing.
I'll tell you, most of it has been after the article came out.
We're pretty overwhelmed by the response.
In fact, before it even hit the stands we were getting, only a couple of issues had gone out to subscribers, we were getting.
And the internet traffic was pretty intense.
They were debunking the Popular Mechanics story.
And we also got, at one point, I think it was about an email a minute, and we've gotten well over 500 uh... public literature thousand email
did everyone who did write an email we are going to try to respond to them uh...
but the problem is we just have so many we're trying to work through them how
many of the more like the stuff that i was reading i would say um...
in the initial blast of email this is before the story without and i think
before many people actually read it uh...
most of them were were pretty negative and pretty mean uh...
And the irony was, a lot of them threw back the same stuff that we had just gone through and debunked.
I mean, we get these emails from people who would say, well, you know, what about jet fuel?
It doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel.
And you'd sit and kind of slap yourself.
Didn't cover it, hey.
Yeah, and say, well, I guess you guys didn't read it yet.
So some of it was a knee-jerk response.
Others were All right, have there been any other significant claims made since the article that ought to be addressed?
We were actually thinking of doing a follow-up to this because a lot of the emails and letters and websites and responses said, well, you didn't address so-and-so.
The point of our article wasn't to retell the story of 9-11.
It wasn't to tell the whole story at all.
The point was to take what we saw as the claims that were getting repeated the most and to put them up to what they wanted, which was serious mainstream media attention and actual investigations into it.
That's what we did.
There are new claims coming in every day, and we are thinking of doing a follow-up.
I'm not sure if we are going to be able to do that.
I think it would be a lot of fun to do that and look at some more.
But I'll tell you, going through 16 of these and having all of them fall apart pretty quickly and turn out to be false, says something about probably what the rest of them are going to be.
What about the vitriolic nature of these So many of these people involved in this.
I mean, it's just... It's beyond the pale.
I mean, what a lot of them are saying is just beyond the pale.
It's incredible to me.
I've never quite seen anything like it.
They're so wrapped up in this.
And I guess they believe that their own government really would do this to them.
I think it's an amazing thing.
I really do.
And I'm not naive, and I don't think our government's perfect, and they've probably done some nasty stuff in the past, but, I mean, on this scale, No, I don't think so.
And it's very vitriolic.
Do you have any thoughts on why it's so intense?
You know, I don't know necessarily why it's so intense.
And it's so angry.
I mean, there's just this massive hatred of the government.
And what I found fascinating, though, is that it was from not only a lot of... We got picked up by a couple of blogs when this came out, Instagram linked to us.
And a lot of the sort of right-wing blogosphere, so to speak, made the point that this is the loony left that was making all these claims.
And when you actually look at it and you see who's making them, it is very loud on the sort of far, far left, left, left wing of the political spectrum, but also on the far right wing.
Isn't that interesting?
It's wild.
And there's this point at which they sort of Back each other up.
They both have this agenda of absolute hatred for either the government or the administration, or all administrations, in sort of any way, the way I feel.
We've kind of come to the conclusion that any way to badmouth this administration is okay, because I think, to a certain extent, the mindset is, well, the government lied to us, so it's okay to lie about them.
And, you know, everyone has a right to be angry about 9-11.
I mean, it was an absolutely tragic day, and there's no doubt that mistakes were made, and that there's a lot of work to be done to make sure that that doesn't happen again.
Everyone has a right to be mad about it, and everyone has a right to ask questions, but in so doing, everyone also has a responsibility to make To have a respect for the truth, and to make the right questions, and to not make this echo chamber of what are sometimes misrepresentations and sometimes outright lies.
I bet you got an awful lot of emails saying you had sold out, you were part of the government official line, and that's all you are, is a government mouthpiece, right?
We have been claimed.
We are on the Pentagon payroll.
They say that we're on the CIA payroll.
That we are just a mouthpiece for the administration.
And the thing was, our story was very apolitical.
I mean, we didn't look at this from a political standpoint.
We just went into the actual physical claims.
The hardware part of it, yeah.
Exactly.
Which is really our expertise.
We don't need or want to get into the politics behind it.
Because that's not really what this is about.
This is about the actual physical evidence that a lot of these sites were citing.
And what's also fascinating is David Corn, who's a writer for The Nation.
I mean, amidst all this, we had this great response from a sort of centrist right wing of the political spectrum and a centrist left wing of the political spectrum.
David Corn, who writes for The Nation, has also apparently been called a CIA plant The 9-11 skeptics movement, and he wrote a nice piece about how, you know, now Bobby McIntyre and David Corn are represented as part of the CIA.
And to a certain extent, these theories are counterproductive.
We're actually getting to the meat of what went wrong that day.
Because they distract everyone's attention, and it's a massive outpouring of energy, and it's misdirected.
What was the craziest theory that you found out there?
Oh, wow.
There are plenty of them.
The Bumble Plains one was one of the weirder ones.
The planes were switched, and there was this... One of them was...
All the planes landed in one spot and then they loaded all the passengers on the flight 93 and shot it down.
Another one was that the World Trade Center was emitting a radio beacon and that in downtown New York there were radio and power outages that morning because of this radio beacon that was homing in these planes.
There were no passengers aboard the planes at all.
Homing in the planes?
The planes were completely remote controlled.
It speaks to their naivete about how airplanes work, to a certain extent, that people look at a global hawk, the technology of global hawk, the unmanned drone, they can make a global hawk fly, why couldn't they just slap that technology into what looks like a Boeing 767, have no passengers on board at all, and fly that in, fill it with explosives, or what have you.
And, I mean, there are levels of inherent complicity from everybody in the government.
I mean, to make these plans work, you'd have to have thousands and thousands of people in on it.
Yeah, I'll say.
And that's just ludicrous.
I know, I know.
Do you have any hope whatsoever?
I mean, the article is now published.
Do you think that in your lifetime, or my lifetime, or anybody who's listening right now, That this will be, the facts will finally be accepted as the real way it happened?
Or do you think this will go on forever?
Or at least until we wipe ourselves off the face of the globe?
You know, I don't know.
That's a very good question.
To a certain extent, it's getting louder, all this ballyhoo about there being an inside job here.
I think in the mainstream, when you talk to people who actually were there, who have first-hand knowledge, I mean, that was our strategy for reporting this, was to get as close to first-hand knowledge as we possibly could.
I mean, there's not even a second thought that there's any possibility that these theories could be true.
And so, you know, I think it would take a A much better effort and much better evidence and real truth, which just isn't there to throw this really into the mainstream, even though it is sort of trickling in there.
You know, if you're going to, you know, it's fine to be angry about this, but to continue to repeat things that are just plain wrong, that you ignore because of your own politics, you know, you're not really serving your own cause.
And I think that's, I just can't see it continuing forever like that.
Well, I wish I could agree with you, but looking at other things that perhaps are near this magnitude, assassinations and other things... Oh, the moon!
Yeah, that one's still there, isn't it?
Lots of people who don't think we ever went to the moon.
Let me go to the phones.
I really do want to let the audience Ask their questions.
I think it's important, so let's do it.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi.
You're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Hi.
I want to ask him a question.
He alluded to how all people were supposedly corralled into the one plane, and that their cell phone conversations were voiced over.
I want to know the technical complexity of that, because these were not famous people.
They were anonymous people and the time frame that it would take to be able to do that.
Well, now wait a minute.
Ben has not said that's what happened, sir.
No, he didn't say it.
He just talked about one of the crazy theories out there.
That's one of them.
Right.
And I was just wondering how, you know, technically, from a technical standpoint of view, would it be to get somebody's voice on a cell phone and then splice together a conversation with their loved ones?
To convince their loved ones that this was the actual person.
Sir, is that what you believe happened?
No, I don't.
You don't.
So you think... I just want him to debunk that theory by saying... I see.
All right.
Ben?
Well, I'll tell you, we didn't look into that.
It's... I actually haven't really heard that one specifically.
But I imagine it would be... It would take, A, a lot of people to do that, and B, you'd have to get... You'd have to somehow get the recordings beforehand so that you have some sort of baseline comparison.
And then, to get that done that day, transmitted, as it's going on, because of course these calls happen real time, would take a pretty Herculean effort, and it's almost impossible.
You can do a pretty good job of splicing together somebody's voice and making a conversation, but you can always tell when it's faked, and especially a loved one.
That would be really tough.
Right.
All right, sir.
That's it.
Thank you for having the show.
You're very welcome.
Wes to the Rockies.
You're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Hey, how are you gentlemen doing?
All right, sir.
Welcome.
Mark from Henderson, Nevada.
Yes, Mark.
I read the piece that Mr. Chertoff wrote, and I want to say, I didn't really see any empirical evidence that would disprove that the government was complicit in 9-11 And one thing about the methodology that I noticed is, it's like, you take these particular theories that people have, take for example the no planes theory at the Pentagon, and try to deconstruct that, and the fact of the matter is, you can prove that a plane flew into the Pentagon, but that still does not disprove that the government was complicit in 9-11.
That's right, you're absolutely right, it doesn't.
But you do acknowledge, unlike most, that a plane did fly into it?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well then what about the pieces of the plane, the burning bodies, the whole thing?
The eyewitnesses, what about all that?
To be honest, you look at the record of this government, I don't think we can believe anything.
You're not answering my question.
Don't talk about the record of the government, talk about The pieces of the plane, sir.
You know, eyewitnesses and the burning bodies and all that.
Eyewitnesses to all of that.
I haven't seen any of that.
This is the most surveilled corridor in the world, and all they have is a little Logitech webcam shot of the Pentagon.
Why don't they show us the video footage?
I'm sure they would have some sort of video footage.
All right, Ben, that's a good question.
There has been some sort of refusal.
Is there video footage that exists that's being held from us?
Well, I'll tell you, we didn't investigate that completely.
In fact, we didn't really work on that at all.
We might think about doing that in a follow-up article, and it's certainly something we'll... Okay, so that would be on the list.
Yeah, it probably would be, because that one seems to be out there quite a bit.
I'll tell you, a lot of the information about what had happened, in fact, all of this stuff, because it's a criminal investigation, and this is standard procedure with just about any time there's a criminal action in terms of a transportation accident, the FBI takes over.
And the FBI, and having dealt with other cases, and in completely separate incidents, reporting during a criminal investigation, they are very reluctant to release anything, because this is their case, and they want to be able to go to the prosecutor, go and prosecute, and have a clean case.
They don't want the media attention.
That's going to, you know, the sort of the media making their own conclusions and people making their own conclusions themselves after reading the media.
So it's very tough and the government has been criticized quite a bit for not releasing enough information.
This was a very big incident.
I think that might be, you know, personally, I think it would be nice if we could get these, if there is video, if we could see it.
But to be perfectly honest, Pretty much standard operating procedure, and beyond that, there's just mountains of evidence to prove that a plane did hit the Pentagon, and there's very little, in fact nothing, that I've seen to say anything to the contrary in terms of empirical evidence.
Do you feel that these 9-11 conspiratorial people might be able to make, finally, enough noise that the government would politically be Forced, would have their hand forced into releasing some of what they have not yet.
Maybe.
You know, I think they'd have to convince a lot of the sort of less prone to believing these conspiracy theories.
They'd have to come up with a lot more and probably better arguments since a lot of these really do fall through.
But I don't think Necessarily.
We will even need to because in all likelihood these trials are probably going to be over in the next couple of years and this stuff will come out in the process of doing that.
What about those who say that there weren't any hijackers on the planes and they feel there's evidence indicating they weren't even there and that they're still out there alive somewhere today.
You've heard that?
Yeah, you know, we also didn't look into that too much because that just seemed so implausible from the very start.
That came out.
There was a BBC report that came out soon thereafter.
And the BBC report, of course, didn't say that they were alive.
It said that people had reported.
Yeah, but somehow it's become that.
Yeah, and it's sort of the echo chamber.
I know, I know.
Ben, hold on.
We're right here at the top of the hour.
We'll be right back.
Ben Chertoff is my guest from the high desert in the middle of the night.
I'm Art Bell.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is.
Ben Chertoff is here from Popular Mechanics Magazine which did an in-depth examination of 16 of the most prevalent claims of the conspiracy people about 9-11, the inside job people, and dealt with them scientifically.
I'm not sure it matters to a lot of people, but they did.
You can either read the article Yourself or look into it yourself, but there's been a very great deal of research Done now that may not matter to a lot of people like Frank in Tampa, Florida whose message I'll have for you in a moment We're just never gonna get to it all but then there were some claims made I think it was on the Alex Jones site that showed a seismic
print of what he claimed would show explosives were going off in the buildings, right?
And I think that you put up the entire graph, which proved that that was not the case.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that was one of my favorite ones.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I mean, it's the kind of thing where you actually talk to people who made the seismic observations and actually look into what it means.
You see that the graph that is repeated over and over again on these sites is this very compressed, very long in terms of time frame graph.
You've got one line that equals a half an hour.
And so it looks like there's this massive spike.
And I guess what one of the theories that pulls out of that is that there was this massive expenditure of energy in ground shaping before the towers collapsed.
Which supposedly bolsters the idea that there were explosives.
Explosives, yeah.
In fact, it was, I believe, Christopher Bolin, who was the same gentleman who had... That article?
Yeah.
Spent some time calling my mother.
He had also called the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who had recorded this stuff.
So we went back to Lamont-Doherty and we found out that the interpretations that have been repeated throughout the conspiracy sites were actually categorically wrong.
That when you look at the graph spread out over a smaller time period, you can actually see what's going on.
We look at it magnified Under one minute or 30 seconds, for instance, as we show, you can see that there are no large spikes at the beginning.
And that, in fact, the bulk of the energy is transmitted when it should be, from what we saw on television, when the debris actually hit the ground.
And, in fact, the very energy waves that the Palisades Observatory recorded Are exactly what you wouldn't see if there were explosives.
Explosives actually have a completely different seismic print when they go off.
Well, shouldn't these people like Alex have to respond to this now?
You would think, and that's, you know, as journalists, it's kind of our job to report what we see, but I think a lot of these sites come in to the That's why I asked you about how long this is going to go on.
I think forever.
Frank in Tampa says, what liars you both are!
pretty rare. They come into it and they ask their questions with their minds already made
up and it's a lot of picking and choosing what sort of evidence you're going to put
up, ignoring a massive ocean of evidence to the contrary.
That's why I asked you about how long this is going to go on. I think forever. Frank
in Tampa says, what liars you both are. Shame on you. You're both agents for the murders.
Agents for the murders, he calls us.
You have lost your credibility, Art, and your guest doesn't have any.
Liars.
That's just what you are.
Liars, liars, liars, liars, liars, liars.
Nine times he says liars, and that's the message.
These minds, if you wish to call them that, are not going to change.
It's amazing, though, the liar argument.
Are they calling everyone we spoke to liars?
I guess.
We couldn't find one person who gave any of these theories any thought whatsoever.
I mean, it's just categorically the opposite.
I mean, are they all liars?
First time caller line, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hello.
Hi Art.
I was just, actually, I just sent you an email in regard to two pictures from United Airlines.
These pictures, I'm a pilot by the way, I've been flying for 11 years.
And I've taken these pictures at about 38,000 feet, and these aircraft passed over me about 1,000 feet above me.
And I snapped two pictures.
Actually, I snapped a few more, but just to kind of get the picture and show you what it looks like, the two stripes that people claimed that they were missiles and these aircrafts were carrying missiles.
I mean, it clearly shows that they were not missiles.
You know, you could clearly see the paint on these aircraft.
United always paints their aircraft like that, and the reason to that is because underneath the aircraft we have usually antennas that are VHF and UHF, and I'm sure you're aware of that, and those antennas cannot be painted.
Collar, why do you think these people want us to believe there were humps and bumps and bombs and missiles when the real story fits?
You know, it's an interesting world, and you know what?
I'll tell you this.
This is the only country where you could believe in things like that.
If it was in a different country, believe me, especially in the Middle East, you wouldn't be able to speak your mind like this.
But this is what makes this country so great, is that there is, you know, freedom of speech.
Well, you're right about that.
And I don't... I mean, I laugh at these stories.
It's just such a joke.
You know, you see all these conspiracies.
Another thing, another reason to that is, I mean, I see some of these websites, obviously, you know, and people have written books about these.
It's just, it's all about money.
People are making money out of this.
Well, there is that.
People are selling books, magazines, and to be fair, popular mechanics in this case.
But there's profiteering going on over this, isn't there, Ben?
I believe there is, and certainly Thierry Maison made, I'm sure, I don't know offhand, but I'm sure he made quite a bit selling that book in France, and there are DVDs being sold, and there is, to a certain extent, a business going on.
But I think your caller really makes a really good point about our investigation of this especially.
You have on these conspiracy sites all these sort of armchair pilots who overnight learn everything they possibly can about an airplane from the World Wide Web, which of course is unreliable at best.
But when you actually talk to the people who fly these planes, you actually talk to the people who build these buildings, it's just categorically false, all these theories.
And they just don't give it any thought.
And it really speaks to the level of A lot of this is politically motivated, isn't it?
and it's just these naive views about how the planes and the government work.
A lot of this is politically motivated, isn't it?
In other words, a lot of the people getting behind this are Bush haters.
Without a doubt. Without a doubt.
There is sort of a feeling of, it doesn't matter whether what I say is true,
as long as it's bad for the administration or bad for the government in general.
I mean, I think some of this goes beyond just Bush.
That is okay.
And I think it's one of the reasons you see people repeating claims that are just patently untrue is because there's a political motivation behind it, as opposed to a motivation to actually learn the truth.
We certainly found that very quickly.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Yes, hi.
Oh, you're going to have to yell at us, son.
Oh, I'm sorry.
My son was at the military base here in Florida when they got a call from the White House.
That plane in Pennsylvania, they had an order to shoot it down.
But I think it went down before they could do this.
Because he was right on the phone with me, and I immediately called Fox News.
Well, I sure wouldn't doubt that, ma'am.
That is the truth.
There was an order out there, and they were setting up a combat radius.
And there's something here, too, about you.
You were talking about your connection with Michael Chertoff.
This came from the mailbag, and it said, the shirt part of his name means devil.
My Russian dictionary also adds spirit of evil to the definition.
This man's name means of the devil, shirt devil, O-F-F, of the And I just, uh, somebody just sent me this, uh, yesterday.
Did you hear that, Ben, of Tchaikovsky, of The Devil?
That's very funny.
That's a Russian dictionary.
My dad has said that too.
Apparently there are a couple of different interpretations of it, because the, because as a Russian word, it's not, um, uh, there's some sort of grammatical problem with it as a word.
So there's all sorts of different theories in my family about how the name came about, whether it actually means little devil or not.
But it's, you know, you want to build a community conspiracy out of that, you're, you know, Welcome to East of the Rockies.
You're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Hi.
I really feel privileged to be able to speak on the radio tonight.
I want to ask about the PBS documentary that was shown on 9-1-1 on Plain Sight, where Mr. Silverstein, who is the owner of the Twin Towers, said that he had on the building number 7 pulled, which is parlance for set with charges of explosives and demolished, on the very day at 9-11, Less than eight hours after the attacks occurred.
Now, doesn't it take days or even weeks to set charges?
So that would say to me that this has been planned for, you know, for a long time in advance.
Ben?
Well, actually, to set up a controlled demolition, it can take, especially for buildings that size, it takes years sometimes.
They have to pull out all the support structures inside, they essentially clean out the office, you've got to run wiring over the entire thing, you can't do it wirelessly for uh... because there's too many signals for these charges
uh... i'm glad somebody brought up the larry silverstein comment because uh...
we certainly looked at that method pretty simple one uh... what if you watch the documentary
again uh... what he said is uh... they decided to pull which is
referring to the fire department
and of course uh... in some uh... circle of the of the control demolition
industry poll is used to mean uh...
that you actually demolish a building But of course, talk to any firefighter.
Walk down the block, talk to a firefighter, ask them what it means when you're in a building and you pull.
There are two things, and we did this of course, there are two things pull means to a firefighter.
It means you can pull hoses out of a truck, or it means you evacuate a building because it's probably going to collapse because it's dangerous.
So when they made the decision to pull, they literally made the decision to leave the building, which they did.
So they were saying, get out, she's not structurally stable and they're going to go.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that's what they meant by pull.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very simple explanation and it's the one that's true.
All right, Ben.
There were a number of statements made by structural engineers and some others that were Misused by the conspiracy folks weren't there to the point where some of these people felt like they've had their lives ruined?
Yes, absolutely.
I think what you're talking about specifically, and this is the one that made it into press, certainly wasn't the only instance we found of this, was a man named Van Romero, who works out at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
He was interviewed by the Albuquerque Journal, I believe it was on 9-11 itself, he was interviewed, and it was printed that he said, quote, there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused its collapse, and that he said that essentially that the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions.
Resembled those of controlled, yes.
Well, soon, we talked to Van Romero at length, and he mentioned to us that soon after that hit the stands, he realized that that wasn't exactly what he said.
What he had said that day, and this is just from watching it on television, he wasn't there.
He was halfway across the country.
What he said was, it looked like controlled demolition.
Which is exactly what you told me earlier in the program about the puffs of dust, right?
Exactly.
You can look at that and say, well, yeah, it kind of looks like explosions.
Of course, they're a lot bigger than what you would see in a controlled demolition, because you actually want the explosive force going into the building and not out the windows.
But what happened with Van Romero is he called up the paper and he asked for a retraction, and he got one.
It was printed, I believe it was a week or two later.
Of course, many of the sites Just put the initial article up.
Not the retraction.
They don't print the retraction.
That's normal.
Some, this is what was even more fascinating, and Mr. Romero went into this with us, some sites actually claim that he had been gotten to powers that be.
Got to him.
Yeah, exactly, and told him to change his story.
But of course he said to us, you know, he has no doubt, absolutely no doubt that The fire that the Trade Center and World Trade Center 7 fell because of sort of the mainstream view that it was damaged from the planes and from the fires.
And he absolutely doesn't think for a second that there were any controlled shaped charges in the buildings.
All right.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Yeah, hi guys.
Great show up.
I'm just wondering how do you get in a plane, a full-size airliner, to go through a 16-foot hole in a Pentagon?
...without clipping a wing or dragging an engine into the surrounding lawns or knocking over lampstanders on the highway.
It seems that the plane evaporated and there were no wing damage or tail segments or luggage or seating or anything visible, including on that website Let's Roll 911.org.
It's very, very informative.
I was just wondering what you had to say about that.
That the, well, first of all, the 16-foot hole that's quoted all over, and it was also quoted in Pyramid Song.
Yeah, before the roof collapsed.
Right.
Well, the only 16-foot hole was on Ring C, and that was an exit hole from the landing gear, according to Mehta Sozen, who had studied this with Askey, who did the building performance report.
And there was the problem, and I think the reason why this speculation was able to run out of control like it has, is because there aren't that many pictures available before.
How do you get level wings, that level, that close to the ground, without dragging a cowling or an engine, or a portion of that aircraft, right through that whole lawn section?
Well, there were.
Leaving fuel burning.
There's no fuel burns on that lawn, except for about the first 25 feet from the building.
Right, well you have to realize that this stuff is moving at 580 miles an hour.
Yeah, but it's compressing against the wall.
Right, so what happens is it goes into the building, and they've done computer simulations of this at length, and you can see exactly where the fuel goes.
It enters the building in a liquid state.
There were skid and burn marks on the lawn, and by the time, unfortunately by the time most of the pictures were out, the section of the Pentagon in question had already collapsed.
Jamie McIntyre for CNN was right there live.
Dating there was no significant wreckage of any sizable aircraft.
Right, there wasn't.
Which is what you would expect when a plane is very thin aluminum and a thing was going extremely quickly and it's hitting reinforced concrete.
The energy involved is enormous.
What about the lamp standards given the altitude of the structure?
The first floor being the major impact site.
The lamp standards on the highway not more than say 40 yards from the building.
How do you get a plane to do a left turn nose-in into a building?
To be perfectly honest, we didn't deal with the lamp stands.
That's the way you're doing the whole show here.
You're not dealing with a lot of connecting dots here.
Well, our purpose in doing this, and I think I've said this before, but our purpose was not to tell the complete story in what we did.
...was we took what was repeated often.
The Lamp Stand one I've seen now since, but it's not one that's repeated very often.
I'll tell you that the highway is actually many hundreds of yards away from the Pentagon.
And when the plane flew in, it didn't just hit the first story, of course.
It hit the first, second, and I believe part of the third story.
And that was all documented from evidence that they recovered soon thereafter.
That's another one that, if you were to do a follow-up, might be worthy of exploration.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, unfortunately, I don't have in front of me what the flight path of the plane was, so I can't say.
Is it belief that it hit about 25 feet in front of the impact of the building?
Is that about where it hit?
Yeah, part of the plane, part of the fuselage, and part of the wing.
And, of course, when you've got a piece of very fragile aluminum moving at that speed, like an airplane, it breaks up.
I mean, it literally shreds.
Uh, and you see this in many other plane crashes.
I mean, it's not just the plane crash at the Pentagon.
Uh, I mean, remember Value Jet that went down in Florida?
Yes.
I mean, there's almost nothing left.
And think of Flight 93 in Changsha.
I mean, there's a perfect example of the thing buried itself, uh, you know, over 30 feet underground.
And all that was left was a massive explosion when it hit.
Uh, when it hit the ground were these tiny scraps of metal.
Because the energy involved We've got another 30 minutes to go.
many times it's equal to uh... the energy of the plane hitting something solid equal
to many tons of tnt
and it's something that i think it's a very hollywood interpretation of what a
plane crash is going to look like because it's not something that we see
every day thank god
thank god indeed alright we are at the bottom of the hour ben so hold tight
we've got another thirty minutes to go ben shirt off is my guest from popular
mechanics magazine which took sixteen of the most popular
prominent uh... spirit or your views
and went to the scientists and the structural engineers
and check them out And they simply didn't check out.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
I'm a man of the desert.
The Desert The Desert
So, I'm going to play a little bit of it.
The Desert So, I'm going to play a little bit of it.
The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
It is indeed.
Good morning everybody from Popular Mechanics.
Ben Chertoff is here and we'll get to as many of you as we can.
toll-free 800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this
is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. It is indeed. Good morning everybody. From
Popular Mechanics, Ben Chertoff is here and we'll get to as many of you as we
can. Stand by.
Oh my god.
Ben, I think that somebody calling himself Big Wave Dave from Portland, Maine, has come up with one that's going to put you right back where you belong.
Great.
He says, Art, conspiracy proven.
Under Windows 95 Word program, set font to Windings, plug in QNY 22, the tale of Flight 11, and see what symbols you see.
This program was made in 1995.
Have you seen that?
I have.
I love those.
I mean, that's like one of the ones that came out right afterwards.
I mean, I know.
I mean, there's no, obviously there's no conspiracy there, but it's really funny.
And of course, that doesn't work if you actually try it.
I don't think it works.
I haven't tried it.
Well, then somebody else here says, look, great program, but sorry, I like conspiracies too much.
Maybe there's some truth in that.
Well, they're fun, you know?
I love reading around this stuff, but this is 9-11 stuff.
Yeah, this is 9-11.
This isn't fun.
Yeah, and these are not your normal conspirators.
This is just too much, and there's too much evidence to the contrary to really make these work.
That's right.
First on CallerLine, your turn with Ben Chertoff.
Hello.
Hi there.
I'm a first-time caller.
I've been listening to you for, I don't know, probably going on nine years now.
I was compelled to call tonight because I really have to take issue with your guest and how he accuses others of sloppy journalism.
Be specific.
Well, first of all, the NTSB According to them, none of the four crashes were given a normal investigation.
Jurisdiction was handed over to the FBI.
So when he says the NTSB didn't find anything, he's not lying.
He's saying a mistruth.
And that's a lot of what I noticed with your guest.
He's not lying.
He's not directly doing anything wrong.
He's just brushing off And skipping over a lot, a lot of things.
Let's get this straight.
You're saying the NTSB was bypassed and the FBI took over the investigation, so of course the NTSB didn't find anything.
Is that what you just said?
supposedly normally when that happened and that's never happened
but normally when that happened if jurisdiction is
needed to be given over to the fbi than that than the ncsb is still supposed to be involved
and they were involved okay then so that's why they didn't find a whole
lot of them well first of all i i'm not exactly sure where you're
referring to uh... or in I mean, it's probably over in the Flight 93 stuff, and they were on scene for quite a while going through the wreckage.
Yes.
And it is standard operating procedure when there is a criminal act having to do with our transportation system that the FBI will claim jurisdiction over that and will control it.
I mean, they will work with the NTSB, but the FBI is in control.
And we were able to talk to some of the NTSB guys who were on scene and able to tell us what they found there.
But I mean, I don't know if you remember the The train crash is a great example, a tragic example, but it's also a good example.
In California, a couple of months ago, the guy who had driven his car onto the train tracks to commit suicide and then had second thoughts, that investigation was immediately handed over to the FBI because it was a criminal investigation.
I mean, that's just how it works.
You know, there's nothing fishy going on, but unfortunately, for people who are convinced that there's something not true out there and require all the evidence, and I really think for some of these dire conspiracy theories, it doesn't matter how much evidence you show them.
That's kind of what I've been telling you all night, really, in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean, the conspiracy is still going to be there, but, you know, the FBI It just doesn't release everything right away, and you have to wait until the trial's over for it to happen.
I mean, even the NTSB is like that, and I worked with them on a number of different stories.
It takes a while for them to come out and say exactly what they found, because they're still conducting their investigation.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hi.
Yes.
Hi, Art.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Kudos to your guest, and Art, thank you for bringing some intellectual sensibility back to the airwaves.
I am so happy to hear your guest tonight.
I listen to the talk radio a lot, from one end of the dial to the other, and it doesn't take long for a person to realize that your guest is totally right when it comes to the extreme left and the extreme right coming at this conspiracy theory.
Let me tell you, this is my opinion, Art, and I don't mean to personally put anybody down, but I have to say that Where Alex Jones is coming from, to me, is an anti-Semitic viewpoint.
The conspiracy theorists, it doesn't take you long to listen to their rhetoric, that they blame the Jews for every world problem that's wrong in this world.
And when you've got people like that, it's just, in my opinion, it's horrible.
And from the extreme left, you've got Michael Moore sitting in the DNC, convention in the guest of honor box next to Jimmy Carter spewing the same rhetoric and unfortunately now Howard Dean at the head of the DNC.
These are both groups that hate Bush.
One hates the government.
One has the likeness, in my opinion, of the Matthew Hales of this world.
And the other ones, I would be embarrassed if I was a Democrat.
And all I can say is kudos.
I have watched every kind of thing that you can watch on this History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the plane that went into the Pentagon, banked to the left, lost his left wing, going 500 miles an hour.
Right.
It doesn't take a stupid person to understand, or a smart person to understand, that that thing went in like a bullet.
And where in the H-E-double-L is Barbara Olsen?
Is she just floating out there somewhere?
I mean, these people are crazy, Art.
Thank you.
Thank you again.
Thank you, and have a good night.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Chiroff.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Hi.
Hello, Ben.
This is Travis from Richmond, Kentucky.
And I agree with you 100% on talking about the planes, how they hit the World Towers and the Pentagon.
I don't think that's really an important issue from the standpoint of what is a crime.
Well, it's only important, sir, because so many of these conspiracy guys are saying it didn't happen.
Well, I know, but I, you know, I have some other questions that aren't answered by either side.
That's fine.
That's fine.
Go ahead.
Okay.
My angle is, it starts with the before 9-11 knowledge, who had knowledge, and so on and so forth.
We'll start with Willie Brown.
Mayor of San Francisco got a phone call the day before.
I heard him say that.
At the pulpit of University Cathedral in Los Angeles with Dr. Dean Scott in November of 2003.
Dr. Scott, rest his soul.
Now, this phone call said what?
All this was going to happen?
Willie Brown got a phone call that said, don't fly to New York.
Don't fly to New York.
Right.
And I've read some other Articles that said that there were a couple of officials that cancelled their flights also on the 10th.
The Attorney General began flying non-commercial several weeks before 9-11.
All right, let's deal with all of that.
Were there any important evidences that you uncovered anywhere along the line, Ben, that people had warning That this was going to happen, indicating prior knowledge?
Well, I'll tell you, this is outside of the scope of what we worked on, specifically on this article.
But, I mean, I think you'll see, especially, and I think the story of September 11th will probably be one, at least, in the government, in the lead-up to it, a total breakdown in security.
And it does look like there were certainly, there were certainly the clues there from what I've read, and this is not speaking to the story we did our investigation because this is really quite far outside of that scope.
We really stuck to the physical claims.
But, you know, I think what we've seen in both the 9-11 report and what's come out in the papers and the news and Richard Clark reports is that there were Uh, at least the clues there and the warnings.
And I think, um, I think what you take away from it is that, uh, before September 11th, there was a major communication breakdown in the federal government.
Um, now whether people actually had foreknowledge that it was going to happen on that day, I can't say yes or no because I haven't.
I remember some stories immediately, almost immediately after the event, uh, indicating that there had been some stocks dumped.
It was a big dump that went on, and that story was short-lived, really.
It sort of went away.
Do you have anything on that at all?
Yeah, you know, we didn't really investigate that in depth at all, but it's certainly something that we came across, and that's been coming in in emails quite a bit.
Yeah, the story there is that there were put options put on American Airlines and United Airlines stock before 9-11, the idea being that somebody profited from it, therefore somebody had to know.
And I think that the story puts it in the Chicago issue.
I'm not exactly sure the specifics of the story, but... I bet the SEC has looked into it.
Yeah, what I do know is that it was investigated, and it turns out that the put options were not just American Airlines and United Airlines, as the conspiracy sites say.
It was, I think, five or six different airlines, because if you go back, to early September of 2001, the airlines were not in good shape to begin with, and there was a lot of talk that there was going to be a pretty big downturn in the aviation stock.
One of these investor newsletters came out and said, you know, aviation is just going bad, period.
This is trending for months.
I mean, this goes back months of trends for a bunch of people.
Dump the stock, and then there was an actual flurry of trading, I believe, on these two airlines.
But from what I've read, and this is again outside of the scope of what we did, that was all pretty solidly debunked well before we got into this, because the trading happened overseas.
Theoretically, the Bin Laden family does have quite a bit of money, and who knows who was making those trades.
But it wasn't in the U.S.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning.
Hey, kudos.
What a wonderful job.
Thanks for bringing this fine man on your program.
You're very welcome.
And I want to thank you, Ben, for reminding... I'm a former Marine Corps veteran, a Gulf War veteran, and I want to thank you for reminding us that my brothers and our American families didn't go over there just to fight over oil.
And for all you callers out there, Please give these men some respect here.
If you can't contain your composure, pick something else up other than a phone.
Now, saying that, Art, you pose an interesting question.
You know, we want to find out why do people want to believe like this?
Why do we have conspiracy theorists?
And why don't they want to trust our government?
Well, I'm not sure that everybody should trust the government.
People in our business should be keeping an eye on the government, but that doesn't mean that everything that the government does is a conspiracy against the people.
Exactly.
But that is a question that does need to be addressed, as far as that part of the process, why people are like this.
And you yourself had a remarkable experience.
Yes.
some kind of a triangle craft yes you know and uh... we have the agenda that
uh... the ufo agenda of course and uh...
our government not talking about and uh...
we have the agenda of the camp real our government all these are all up to do
so i can understand why we have this
kind of a situation here and uh... the freedom of mobility i think uh... is you know
the mcgill heart of the ufo matter because of the propulsion system
All right.
That's another show, sir.
I appreciate your call.
Thank you very much.
But I'm going to keep trying to keep on track here.
You're on the Air Coast to Coast AM with Ben Chertoff.
Hello.
Hello.
Is this me?
I'm one of the conspirators.
Dick.
Dick.
I had to cut that out.
We don't allow last names.
Well, I beg your pardon.
So your name is Dick.
We'll start over so we get it in.
Your name is Dick.
I'm one of the conspiracy theorists who was one of the very first ones who came out when the security camera video at the Pentagon was released, and that convinced me.
It was completely data-driven, my conclusions, and I got the photographs out and put them on the Internet, and I just wanted to say that the Popular Mechanics article didn't address it at all.
Yet, I believe it is one of the most popular, one of the most persuasive of the arguments.
Basically, it's two things.
The security camera video that was released shows a smaller plane.
It also shows a very thick, creamy cloud of trail of what we presume is a missile.
Because it's too thick for contrail.
Heading toward the Pentagon.
So you think it was a missile, not an airplane?
I believe that the scenario that I have, and Professor A.K.
Dudney, an editor of Scientific American, the view is that the Pentagon, the 757 was there.
And it flew over the Pentagon and landed at Reagan National Airport only one mile away, beyond.
The killer jet was an F-16 or some other fighter jet that is smaller and differently proportioned, and that is based not on speculation, but the proportions are based on the security camera video.
Okay, Ben?
That's based on the five frames of video that you see and still repeated all over again.
There's one frame where you can see the plane.
I mean, you're basing it on that one still, correct?
Yes.
I'll tell you what you have in there.
Of course, the nature of security cameras like that, to save data and to save...
I don't know how many frames per second that was, but it's less than, fewer than 30 frames per second.
Probably closer to 10 or maybe even fewer than that.
So you have this one shot of a blurred, completely, because of course it's not a fast shutter, so you've got this blur on the screen.
You can barely see what it is, whether it's a plane, whether it's a 757, whether it's an F-16.
I think there is by far enough empirical evidence to say that that is, in fact, a 767.
Well, besides, it wasn't F-16 parts in pieces, or a missile from an F-16, or a black box from an F-16.
None of that was true.
Exactly.
I mean, you may wish to believe these things, folks, but please, the facts are the facts, and they're pretty well documented in this article.
Is there any other good reading that you would recommend to people who are the few out there that might be teetering or tottering one way or the other and haven't made up their minds?
To go beyond this?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, you know, people, you know, there's a lot of bad mouthing about the 9-11 Commission report and I certainly, you know, I don't want to say that everything came out there as clearly as it could have.
They did a pretty Herculean task.
It certainly was an independent commission.
Go through the footnotes in the 9-11 Commission Report.
I mean, if you're really serious about this.
Because you see what they saw, and you get pointed to the actual source material.
People fault the report for not having enough evidence.
Well, it's all there.
It's just in about 60 pages of footnotes in the back.
And, you know, we certainly did our share of that.
Among all the other reporting we had, but there's a lot of stuff in there and it's, you know, it's overwhelming the amount of evidence that there is for events played out the way most people really saw them played out.
Okay, Ben, this is a part of the show here where I have to ask now if you want to give out your home number.
Loosen, buddy.
Thank you for being on the program.
Thank you.
And I doubt that we changed any seriously made-up minds, but I appreciate your bringing the sanity and the facts to the program and taking the time to stay up late to do it on top of that.
Thank you.
That was a lot of fun.
I hope everyone, you know, if you have any questions, go out and pick up Popular Mechanics.
It's still on the newsstand now, and please give it a read.
Good night, my friend.
Thank you.
Good night.
See you all tomorrow night.
Crystal, as always, with the right words to carry us out of here.
From the high deserts, the green high deserts, good night.
Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky This magical journey will take us on a ride
Filled with a longing, searching for the truth Will we make it till tomorrow?
Will the sun shine on you?
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