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March 5, 2005 - Art Bell

02:53:09

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Ben Chertoff - Debunking 911 Myths

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01:07:23

ben chertoff

01:10:21

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning in most places.
		Tonight is going to be an extremely contentious radio program.
		Very, very contentious.
		We're going to have Ben Chirdoff on, I guess somehow the distant cousin of Michael Chirdoff, 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 pull-out 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 to join the fight in Iraq.
		A team of U.S. 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 4 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.
		Now, 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 okay, but if you're not, then you're not okay.
		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, there is 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, 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 p.m. 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?
		then it goes into exactly what you should report as the above is a rough estimate of what you saw craft with four lights to which
		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.
		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.
	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 if 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, the bridge is 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 Heck 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 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 Earthweek.
	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.
	A 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 deepwater 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 midsummer.
	The official temperature of 61 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in the southwest coastal town of Frederickschaub was the highest winter reading since record-keeping began.
	And here in the desert, as I've been telling you, 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 Niño or whatever.
	They haven't named it yet.
	They haven't really talked about it.
	I haven't heard any talk about that.
	But 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, going to 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 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.
	Quote, 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.
	But like most things that have one really good side, I'm sure somebody in the military said, whoa, 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.
	So, 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.
unidentified		Abumba, Abumba, Abumba, Abumba.
		Abomba Can you hear my heartbeat in this home?
		you know We were over and we never used to make a city.
		Laying in the shadows From two at night Till the morning light Are you ready?
		Right tonight You and me All of the one One of the three Give me
		all we got We've laid it down Take it And we'll talk it down We'll fall into the night 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.
		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 Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Myths and Conspiracy Theories.
		That's what we're about to get into, and heavily at that.
		Stay right there.
unidentified		Stay right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tell you what, let's start out easily in the myth and conspiracy side of things, shall we?
		This would 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, in a 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 1 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 president's, 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 don't for one second, not one second, do I believe any of it?
		And oh, 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.
unidentified		Okay?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 ten 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.
		Lawn C in Florida, or this one.
		This is from Michael Ferreira of Wing TV, Wing Nut TV, 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, all right, you're a traitor.
		You're a coward.
		You're a sellout of America.
unidentified		Defend yourself, traitor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what Michael says to me most times when he writes stuff like that.
		It 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.
		He said, Jack says, I see you're preparing to have the popular mechanics government disinformation, that's in parentheses, 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 has 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 Chirtoff 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 Chirtoff 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 tonight.
		Now, hmm, let's think about this a little bit.
		Alex Jones, Dave von Kleist.
		Now, 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.
		Wait, he also had Dave on Kleist 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 Kleis, anyway, 9-11 in plain sight.
		So 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're going to have me on 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.
		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 they're going to debunk them as first time, as far as I know.
		First time, as far as I know, that this side of it has even been aired on this program.
		So I think that it's more than fair.
		Absolutely more than fair.
		Now, here's something else interesting that has occurred.
		Over on the Jeff Rentz 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 mechanics MAG 911 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 Chirtoff.
	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, you know, 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 Rent site that appear from time to time, I think it's clearly, in my opinion, an anti-Semitic website.
	Let's see, at the bottom of this article by Bolin on the Rent site, it says, controlled press hides, I'll get it straight, Chirtov'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.
	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.
	Now, 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 nut.
unidentified		Okay?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 of things, are off your nuts.
		That's what I think.
		I think it's a fringe group that has formed with a gathering.
		It's like a snowball rolling downhill, getting to be bigger and bigger and bigger, and I think it's nutty.
		Nevertheless, this night we will have Benjamin Chidov on, and he will certainly answer questions on the telephone from all of you, even the kinds of questions that 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 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, believe, 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 have 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 have 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.
		Until I see one myself, I've seen an unidentified flying object.
		That much I can personally attest to.
		Now, 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 is no different than having Alex Jones on by himself, or Mr. Van Kleist 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 perhaps from my point of view, a little sanity.
		All that said, here we go.
		Open lines.
		First time caller line, you are on the air.
		Hello.
		Hello?
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hi.
		You're on the air, my dear.
		Where are you calling from?
unidentified		State College, Pennsylvania.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		I just have a question about the molten steel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome.
unidentified		You're a little early.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the guy to really answer this is about to be on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But what is your question?
unidentified		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 levels?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, I can assure you we're going to get to all of that.
		We are 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.
		And they're very different temperatures.
unidentified		Oh, I know that.
		I know that.
		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.
		Gravity is the only force acting upon that up there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then you're saying it's possible.
		Yeah, well, okay.
		I'll try and remember those things to ask.
unidentified		Can I fast blast those to you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Do that, and that'll help me remember.
		All right.
		Coming up in a moment, you'll just stay right where you are.
		It's going to get pretty rough around here.
		Ben Chirtoff 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.
unidentified		To realize just what I have found.
		I am in only care of who I am.
		It's all clear to me now.
		My heart is on fire.
		I think.
		You're looking good just like a snake in the grass.
		One of these days you're gonna break your glass.
		Don't bring me down.
		No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
		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.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies.
		Call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
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.
unidentified		Oh, nonsense, Darren.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 to 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, rather, 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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That would be fine, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good.
		All right.
		Here we go.
		Let's see.
		Headline on this Rentz site, Bell host 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 Chirtoff is a cousin of Michael Chirtoff, 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 Chirtoff 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 Jirdoff, about the journalistic ethics practiced by Hearst Corporation and Popular Mechanics, in which a cousin of the Homeland Security Tsar 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 Schumfeld, 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 Chirtoff?
		And will you 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 LL Airlines and a Massad operative in 1949 and 1950 during Operation Magic Carpet?
		Tip.
		Ben's mom told me that Ben is a cousin of Michael Chirtoff, the secretary of DHS.
		Ben's mom, Judy Dargan, can be reached in Pelham, New York, where Ben graduated from high school in 1998.
		Judy told me that Ben's dad is Larry Chirtoff.
		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 Chirtoff and his ties to Michael Chirtoff and Michael's ties to Israel and the Mazad, please read the following.
		9-11 and Chirtoff cousin wrote 9-11 propaganda for PM.
		Controlled press hides Chirtoff's Israeli roots.
		Will Art Bell ask Ben Chertoff about his ties to DHS?
		That pretty well covers it.
		He does say, Ms. 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 Bulletin.
		Ben, welcome to the show.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for having me here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, let's address some of what was said in this panicked piece that was put up so quickly on the ranks.
		Where would you like to begin?
		I just read the whole thing.
		I mean, what's true and what's false?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you, I never thought I'd be compared to Uday and Couset.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was a little rough.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure if I 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You didn't even find out that you were related to Michael.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And of course, it's not a very common last name, so it jumps out at you on the subway.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what did you do?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Call mom and say, hey, mom, what's the deal?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, I called my father and we chatted about it.
		And, you know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you mean you're not even absolutely positive?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		So if I am a cousin, and my mother had said on the phone after Chris Bolin had tracked her down and called numerous times, what she did say was that she thought I might be a distant cousin.
		But of course that has turned into direct cousin.
		Never met him, never spoken to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the Massad thing?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		You're going to have to ask Michael Chertoff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
unidentified		I have no idea.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Man, I'll tell you, all kinds of articles on that rent site are Jew this, Jew that.
		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 till after you dealt with this article anyway.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was as we were going to press with it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So there you go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so what made you and or Popular Mechanics decide to pursue this madness anyway?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 reopened 911.org.
		I might be mixing that up.
		But there was an ad, advertisement 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 Centers.
		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.
		The magazine has 102 years history reporting on military affairs, reporting on engineering, reporting on science and technology.
		And all these claims focused on very physical evidence, or what they were posing as physical evidence.
		For instance, that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel.
		So how could jet fuel have been responsible for melting the steel in the World Trade Center?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we'll get to that.
		And 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.
unidentified		Exactly.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		When did that begin?
		How long ago?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I guess we started the reporting back in November when we had a team assembled and we started going out and actually picking the stuff apart.
		And it ran all the way through mid-January, I mean, as we were going to press.
		I guess it was earlier than that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben, how did you decide on what the 16 most important claims to investigate would be?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		What we did was we looked through a lot of website searches and got Pierre Maison's book and got the Painful Questions book, 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 sort of represented what was out there, the most common 16 claims, but also the most plausible, because a lot of the claims are sort of at face value 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		And so web research and getting the books probably in plain sight as well.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		We watched that a number of times.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		All right.
		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.
		Let's go through each and every one of them.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So start wherever you want to.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've got, I mean, we can go in the order of the magazine or we can any way you want.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's go with the magazine.
		I've got it right in front of me.
		The pod question.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the pod theory shows up a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is the pod theory?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 CNN.
		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, 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.
		I mean, 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, I mean 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, actually to a number of imaging experts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that the one you've got in the magazine here?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 then that was a photo that came from it.
		So we took the original film and the still footage from the original CNN feeds.
		And we sent them to as many imaging experts as we could.
		And we found Ronald Greeley, who is at a space photography laboratory at Arizona State University.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And it's a real science.
		So, you know, 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.
unidentified		Oh, I know.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And it will spill into the other side.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's a very inexact science to try to analyze something from a video.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's like trying to find stuff on Mars.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, exactly.
		Which is why we tried to focus on the photograph itself.
		And when he looked at the photograph and very quickly figured out that to a certain extent there's sunglint, 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 the 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then in every way, a standard 767.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Absolutely.
		And in the magazine, if you pick up a copy, you can see that we juxtapose it next to a, I believe it's a picture of a Qantas Airlines 767.
		And 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 I mean, it's a plane United Airlines 767.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So hogwash, no missile under there, no pod with high explosives, or I don't know what they thought it was, something like that, though, right?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 right there.
		And the consensus was, why would you want to do that?
		And B, 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 the plane would take an enormous amount of restructuring of the actual wing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely conclusively.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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's, to me, crazy on the face of it.
		I mean, 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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
unidentified		And of course, it would take thousands of people to keep their mouths shut, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If such an order really went out.
		All right.
		Hold it right there, Ben.
		We'll be right back.
		It's bottom of the hour.
		Ben Shikhoff is my guest.
		And we're discussing 9-11.
		Ben is from Popular Mechanics.
		They would be 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 and probably more before the night is done.
		Keep your dial right there.
unidentified		Don't leave me this way.
		I can't survive.
		Can't take it without your love.
		Oh, baby, don't need me this way, no.
		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 love her badly?
		Want to 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 you love All you love All you love All you love All you love is one To sing a lonely song Of a deep blue dream Seven horses seem to be on the mark
		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.
		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 Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tonight Ben Chirtoff is here from Popular Mechanics, and he's talking about the science of the collapse of the buildings 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 standdown 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 buildings.
		But, nevertheless, there it is.
		No standdown order.
		Deal with that one, Ben.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is one of my favorites because it's incredibly complicated.
		And to a certain extent, it's one of the more compelling claims that you see bounced around.
		And 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.
		And also, it shows, I mean, a lot of these conspiracies, they have such animosity towards the government yet have this assumption that everything is going to, and the government is going to work like clockwork.
		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 because 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.
		I mean, they had radar stations that run the coast.
		I mean, since September 11th, of course, this has all been changed quite drastically in NORAD's control.
unidentified		Oh, of course, but I think that on that morning, yeah, exactly.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And those were 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 talk to the FAA guys, and of course we talked, we 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're getting a lot of static on this line for some reason.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Are we?
unidentified		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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-9-11, was looking outward for threats, not at domestic air travel, not NORAD.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I mean, there was a lot of lobbying in Congress that you've got this expensive sort of dinosaur agency out in Cheyenne Mountain that's 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 sort of 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 warning, they only had, and this is again changed, 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, we could only talk about the ones that were on alert.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		It's getting out.
		Yeah, exactly.
		A fighter jet on alert is fueled, it's ready to go, it's armed, it's ready to fly at a moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So of those.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Of those 14 in the U.S., there were only on the eastern seaboard within range of Washington and New York.
		There were only five.
		Officially, there had to be two.
		I mean, it had to be four on alert.
		There happened to be an extra one at Langley.
		There were three down there after we talked to the guys down at Langley.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was not an unusually small amount at that time to be on alert?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		No, that was what was required.
		That was the standard operating procedure before 9-11.
		And there were, I mean, think about, when you think about it in the pre-September 11th mindset, why would you have more on alert?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's not.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, 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 need to have more, or there was no perceived need to have more than 14 plus.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so who was actually scrambled?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Who got where?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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, New York, I'm sorry, Boston Air Traffic Control, Boston Center, called NEAD 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.
		Yeah, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It sure was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I heard there was a great deal of confusion.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think the hijacker actually, they turned off the transponders, right?
		Exactly.
		They drop off the regular computer screens.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 movie example, it's this very elegant radar system where you can just pinpoint what you're looking at, and the computer knows what it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because they're actively transmitting.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That's how transponders work, exactly.
		And it'll tell you the altitude, because remember you're looking on 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 in the pain.
		You couldn't see that on the same screen that you could see the transponders.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Understood.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		So you'd have to switch screens, and that led to an enormous amount of confusion.
		And of course, when you get out into 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 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they did call NORAD.
unidentified		They did call NORAD.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Several times.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because there was really no precedent for this.
unidentified		None whatsoever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 jets that were scrambled?
		How far did they get?
		How close did they get?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And so these planes are being held out there.
		They are, of course under the 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.
		And so they were hanging out over the Atlantic Ocean.
		Air traffic control is scrambling to try to find these flights.
		They couldn't find the flights.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did they ever get vectored?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Eventually, they were brought into New York City, and that was after the second tower was hit.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The accusation that there was a stand-down order is ludicrous.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 was sort of standing, this goes way back to the Constitution, that the military can't police the civilians of the U.S. And 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 the way President Bush had authorized NORAD to use lethal force against, if there were more flights out there, of course, that was way too much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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 it could be shot down, that perhaps nothing was said about it.
		I thought, well, that one might be logical, but that's not what happened, is it?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good point.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, that would have been what every journalist praised 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 eight 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 the state of massive confusion, you read those and there's no direction attached to it.
		There's no, 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 news is, daily newspapers, they did an incredible Herculean effort reporting this stuff.
		But 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 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 six 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, and that's not uncommon.
		We talked to a whole bunch of crash investigators, and they'd 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 have 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.
		And you've got the engine, which is extremely dense.
		One of the engines augered into the ground.
		The other rolled along down a hill into a catchment basin, and it's directly in line with where the flight is going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't there audio, plenty of audio, or at least quite a bit of audio evidence?
		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		No, that was absolutely true.
		I mean, there was plenty of audio evidence.
		People were making calls from the airphones.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 also the section that just very quickly the pieces all fell into place, and very quickly it was obvious that there was no jet that shot them down.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you were actually approaching doing this story then with a pretty clear, open mind in that you even thought the same thing I did about this flight, that it could have been shot down and what a horrible decision it would have been, but a big story to uncover to be sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you would have uncovered it and told that story if it really was that way.
unidentified		Absolutely.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be huge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, of course it would.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		It's the scoop we all dream about as journalists.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		The fact of the matter is they just weren't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When we come back, we need to talk about melted steel.
		That's a central part of all this business.
		And, you know, temperatures and all of that, all right?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Great.
unidentified		Good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Hold it right there.
		From the high desert, my guest is Ben Chirtoff 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.
unidentified		When we come back.
		He's got this dream about buying some land.
		He's gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands.
		And then he'll settle down.
		It's a quiet little town and forget about everything.
		But you know he'll always keep moving.
		You know he's never gonna stop moving.
		Cause he's rolling, he's the roadstone.
		When you wake up, it's a new morning.
		The sun is shining, it's a new morning.
		You're going, you're going home.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		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.
		We're never going to have time to get everything and get calls, too, but we're going to try, so stay put.
unidentified		We're going to try.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Some of the conspiracy loonies really ought to have to read this, the way they demand that we read and watch their DVDs and so forth.
		Popular mechanics.
		My guest is Ben Cheeredoff.
		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the big one.
		That's everywhere.
		And that was on that full-page ad that we saw that really set this whole thing in motion.
		Well, it turns out that 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.
		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 was a deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department, and he mentioned to us, 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 like steel.
		And of course, the World Trade Center hit 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, fireproofing is knocked off, and 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, and what we sort of counter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It bends.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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, that are 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 furniture, computers, desks, carpets, drapes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that reached what kind of temperature?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, it probably reached around 1,800 degrees.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 of floors and the stresses when one floor bangs down on the next?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, exactly.
		What happens is you have this massive heat, and it's going to soften, and it worked differently.
		We were lucky enough to work pretty closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and they had the luxury of almost two years and a lot of funding and time to go through and sort of 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.
		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 the places that it would have gone in the actual buildings.
		And then they lit the whole thing on fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the result?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		What they found was that the steel weakened significantly.
		And they think that there were pockets of areas that were over 1,800 degrees.
		And at that point, steel has usually less than 10% of its structural strength.
		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 spray-on 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So no mainstream people you talked to at all went along with this planted explosives theory?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not one.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in fact, all the evidence points.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		There are oceans of evidence that point to the contrary.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is it?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Very, very reputable group of scientists.
		In other words, they proved that's what brought the buildings down.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that is.
		And, you know, they weren't even looking into it for the I mean, the purpose of their investigation wasn't to say whether it was 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are the puffs of dust supposed to mean to these conspiracy theorists?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 controlled demolition, I've heard them called squibs, were placed strategically throughout the building to ensure that they came down and also 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 buildings collapse, you can see as they start to collapse, there are areas where dust and debris is ejected forcibly outside of the building.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Out of the windows.
		I mean, it literally are the windows breaking.
		And that has led to the idea that those are demolition squibs.
		Those are controlled demolitions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But in fact, they were what?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 overpressurization of the floor.
		So all this air has to go somewhere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Blows out the windows.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		It blew out the windows.
		And that's what it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So 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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, exactly.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		It's really the simple answer that answers this question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No plane debris at the Pentagon.
		Let's jump over there very quickly.
		This one I've heard on my I've had people challenge me.
		There's no plane, they say, that hit the Pentagon.
		This is ridiculous.
		There were no plane parts there.
		And then I usually ask the person, "Well then, 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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That's one of the most widespread theories that came out in Terry Maison'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 many fewer cameras there.
		You can't get up close.
		And also, just the nature of the crash.
		I mean, the planes that hit the World Trade Center were hitting into, 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 cut out 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It also hit part of the ground first, apparently, right?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Big thing about the size of the hole in the Pentagon.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Right, the size was too small.
		What happened was one of the wings hit the ground and started to shear off.
		And then, 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.
		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, 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 the lawn of the Pentagon.
		Well, there were photographs of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And not only photographs, but eyewitness testimony of people who said they were holding plane pieces in their hand.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And other evidence that some people were too, I don't know, I guess, shocked to even film.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's called the bumbleplane theory.
		We didn't so much get into that.
		The idea is that, and there are different takes on this, that it was at Newburgh, that it was at Otis Air Force.
		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 taken out of context, it's used as evidence that this was all planned from beginning to fit everyone on to Flight 93.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Right, and that seems to be the one that at the end they'll say, well, okay, fine, all the other stuff, you know, whatever, but you have to admit that World Trade Center VII 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 VII, and they didn't do much investigating into it.
		Of course, 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.
		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 the 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I just said, my God, that's already documented visually at this point?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 without load-bearing columns in between them.
		There were 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 NIST 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 that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that just fed the fire.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 it collapses, when you look at some of the photographs on the video footage, and this is what NIST did extensively, you can see that the penthouse drops away and they disappear into the structure one after another.
		And then you see the building starting to fall from that east side of the structure.
		That falls first, and then that pulls down the west side of the structure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
		Back to the Pentagon for a sec.
		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is it?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		They were made not to shatter because they were blast-proof windows.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Remember, it's the Pentagon, folks.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And so what you have is this structural that 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, you know, all said and done.
		It was a tragic day, but he had to, you know, say 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.
		And of course, not all the windows survived.
		Many of them broke, especially those immediately surrounding the crash.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		All right.
		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, said he knew somebody who shot down Flight 93.
		Is that correct?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 let'sroll911.org that they named the pilot, and they named him as Major Rick Gibney.
		And Rick Gibney is actually Lieutenant Colonel Rick Gibney, and he is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not a major at all.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Not a major at all.
		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?
		Well, 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 Lieutenant Gibney 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 on a combat radius over air combat patrol, rather, over Washington.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben, hold tight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're at the bottom of the hour.
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		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, so my guest is Ben Chikoff.
		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 threatened 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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Well, so that's what we did, and the answer was absolutely not.
		Nobody from the 119 got anywhere near Flight 93.
		What happened was Rick Gibney flew out to Bozeman, Montana, where Ed Jacobi was.
		He flew out in a modified two-seat F-16D, landed out in Bozeman.
		They gave Mr. Jacoby a quick brush-up on how to use the ejection seat, gave him a flight suit and a spur 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 could come and run the relief effort at the World Trade Center site.
		So, yeah, he wasn't anywhere near Flight 93.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, 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, probably closer to 1,000 emails.
		And to everyone who did write an email, we are going to try to respond to them.
		But the problem is we just have so many.
		We're trying to work through them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many of them were like the stuff that I was reading?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I would say in the initial blast of emails, and this is before the story was out, and I think this is before many people had actually read it, most of them were pretty negative and pretty mean.
		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, what about jet fuel?
		It doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel.
		And you'd sit and kind of slap yourself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Been covered, hey.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and say, well, I guess you guys didn't read it yet.
		So some of it was a knee-jerk response.
		Others were long, in-depth letters saying, well, okay, you guys answered these 16 claims.
		Well, what about these 52 other claims?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, have there been any other significant claims made since the article that ought to be addressed?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		You know, 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.
		And 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 actually an actual investigation into it.
		So that's what we did.
		You know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the vitriolic nature of so many of these people involved in this?
		I mean, it's just 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, hmm.
		No, I don't think so.
		And it's very vitriolic.
		Have any thoughts on why it's so intense?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		You know, I don't know necessarily why it's so intense, and it is 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 that a lot of the, we got picked up by a couple of blogs when this came out, Instapundent 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that interesting?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		It's wild.
		And there's this point at which they sort of back each other up.
		And they have different, they both have this agenda of absolute hatred for either the government or the administration or all administrations.
		And sort of Any way, the way I feel, or the way that 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 lies 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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I bet you got an awful lot of emails saying you had sold out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You were part of the government official line, and that's all you are is a government mouthpiece, right?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		We have been claimed.
		We are on the Pentagon payroll.
		We're apparently, 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 claim.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The hardware part of it, yeah.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, 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 the sort of centrist right-wing of the political spectrum and the centrist left-wing of the political spectrum.
		David Korn, who writes For The Nation, has also apparently been called a CIA plant by some of the 9-11 skeptics movement.
		And so he wrote a nice piece about how now Bobby Mechanics and David Corn is represented as part of the CIA.
		And to a certain extent, these theories are counterproductive for actually getting to the meat of what went wrong that day.
		Because they distract everyone's attention, and it's this massive outpouring of energy, and it's misdirected.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What was the craziest theory that you found out there?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Oh, wow.
		There are plenty of them.
		The Bumble Planes one was one of the weirder ones, that the planes were switched, and that there was this one of them was all the planes landed in one spot, and then they loaded all the passengers onto 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.
		That there were no passengers aboard the planes at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Homing in the planes.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Planes were completely remote-controlled, which it speaks to a certain naivete about how airplanes work to a certain extent, that people look and they say, well, 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, it just, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'll say.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And that's just ludicrous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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, lifetime, that 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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		You know, I don't know.
		That's a very good question.
		To a certain extent, it's getting louder, all this bellyhoo about there being an inside job here.
		But 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 much better effort and much better evidence and some 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wish I could agree with you, but looking at other things that perhaps are near this magnitude, assassinations and other things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, the moon.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that one's still there, isn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 line, you're on the air with Ben Trirtoff.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, how you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With Ben Trirdoff.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		I want to ask him the question.
		He had alluded to how all the people were supposedly crowded 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 timeframe that it would take to be able to do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben has not said that's what happened, sir.
unidentified		No, he didn't say it.
unidentified		He had just talked about one of the crazy theories out there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's one of them.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sir, is that what you believe happened?
unidentified		No, I don't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You don't.
unidentified		I just want him to debunk that theory by saying...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you, we didn't look into that.
		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 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.
		I mean, that would be really tough.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, sir.
unidentified		That's it.
unidentified		Thank you for having the show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
		Welcome to the Rockies.
		You're on the air with Ben Sherdoff.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hey, how are you gentlemen doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome.
unidentified		Mark from Henderson, Nevada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I read the piece that Mr. Sherkoff 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		You're absolutely right.
		It doesn't.
		But you do acknowledge, unlike most, that a plane did fly into it?
unidentified		I don't know.
unidentified		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then what about the pieces of the plane, the burning bodies, the whole thing, the eyewitnesses?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about all that?
unidentified		To be honest with you, I mean, you look at the record of this government.
unidentified		I don't think we can believe anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Ben, that's a good question.
		Why?
		There has been some sort of refusal.
		Is there video footage that exists that's being held from us?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 be doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so that would be on the list.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, probably it would be, because that one seems to be out there quite a bit.
		I'll tell you, a lot of the information about what hit the Pentagon, 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 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, that's 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.
		I mean, in terms of empirical evidence.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've heard that?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, we also didn't look into that too much because that just seems 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but somehow it's become that.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and it's sort of the echo chamber of this.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben, hold on.
		We're right here.
		We're at the top of the element.
		We'll be right back.
		Ben Tridhoff is my guest from the high desert in the middle of the night.
		I'm Art Bell.
unidentified		What do you do when you get lonely?
		Go one way and by your side.
		You've been loved, hiding much too much.
		Thank you.
		Wanna take a ride?
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		Ben Chirtoff 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 going to get to it all.
		But Ben, 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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was one of my favorite ones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, you just, it's the kind of thing where you actually talk to the 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 timeframe graph.
		And you've got one line that equals a half an hour.
		And so it looks like there's this massive spike.
		And I guess one of the theories that pulls out of that is that there was this massive expenditure of energy and ground shaking before the towers collapsed, which supposedly bolsters the idea that there were explosives.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Explosives, yeah.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		So actually some, in fact it was, I believe Christopher Bolin, who is the same gentleman who had also called the Lamont-Dougherty Earth Observatory who had recorded this stuff.
		So we went back to Lamont-Dougherty 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, you 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 Palisades Observatory recorded are exactly what you wouldn't see if there were explosives.
		That explosives actually have a completely different seismic print when they go off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, shouldn't these people like Alex have to respond to this now?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 into the reporting of this stuff, and those who actually do go through at least some legwork of picking up a phone, which seems to be 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, 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.
		As 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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		It's amazing, the liar argument.
unidentified		I mean, are they calling everyone we spoke to liars?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guess.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time caller line, you're on the air with Ben Shirtoff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		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, show you what it looks like, the two stripes that people claim 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 themes 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		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, and 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're right about that.
unidentified		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, I mean, I see some of these websites, obviously, you know, and people have written books about these.
		It's all about money.
		People are making money out of this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 their 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 sort of the level of, I mean, to a certain extent, it's just like these naive views about how the planes and the government work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A lot of this is politically motivated, isn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, a lot of the people getting behind this are Bush haters.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Ben Schirtoff.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Yes, hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you're going to have to yell at us, huh?
unidentified		Well, I'm sorry.
		My son was at the military base here in Florida when they got a call from the press, or actually 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I sure wouldn't doubt that.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That is the truth.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		There was an order out there, and they were setting up a combat radio.
unidentified		And there's something here, too, about you.
		You were talking about your connection with Michael Shertov.
		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, OFF, of the.
		And I just, somebody just sent me this yesterday.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you hear that then?
		Of Chikov?
		Of the devil?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That's very funny.
unidentified		It's a Russian dictionary.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		My dad has said that too.
		Apparently, there are a couple of different interpretations of it because as a Russian word, it's not, 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.
		You know, you want to build a community conspiracy out of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to it.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Shirtoff.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi.
		I really feel privileged to be able to speak on the radio tonight.
		I want to ask you about the PBS documentary that was shown on 9-1-1 in Plain Sight, where Mr. Silverstein, who is owner of the Twin Towers, said that he had built the number 7 pulled, which is parlance for set with charges and explosives, and demolished on the very day of 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 a long time in advance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ben?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, actually, to set up a controlled demolition, it can take, especially for buildings that size, it takes years sometimes.
		Then 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 because there's just too many signals to these charges.
		But I'm glad somebody brought up the Larry Silverstein comment because we certainly looked at that, and that's a pretty simple one.
		If you watch the documentary Again, what he says is they decided to pull, which is referring to the fire department.
		And of course, in some circles of the control demolition industry, pull is used to mean 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they were saying, get out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		She's not structurally stable, and they're going to go.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what they meant by pull.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it's a very simple explanation, and it's one that's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Ben.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yes, absolutely.
		And I think what you're talking about specifically, and this is the one that made it into press, and this 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Resembled those of controlled structures.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Old structures.
		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.
		And 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which is exactly what you told me earlier in the program about the puffs of dust, right?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		I mean, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not the retraction.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		They don't print the retraction.
unidentified		That's normal.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Some, this is what was even more fascinating, and Mr. Amero went into this with us.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Some sites actually claimed that he had been gotten to the powers that B had.
unidentified		Got to him.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Chertoff.
unidentified		Hi.
		Yeah, hi, guys.
		Great show up.
		I was 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'sroll911.org.
		It's very, very informative.
		I was just wondering what you had to say about that.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, the 16-foot hole that's quoted all over, and it was also quoted in Kieran Misson.
unidentified		Yeah, before the roof collapsed.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, the only 16-foot hole was on Ring C, and that was an exit hole from the landing gear, according to Meta Sozen, who had studied this with ASCII, who did the building performance report.
		And there was the problem, and I think the reason why this speculation was kind of able to run out of control like it has, is because there aren't that many pictures available before.
unidentified		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, there were, and they had to.
unidentified		Leaving fuel burning.
unidentified		There's no fuel burns on that lawn except for about the first 25 feet from the building.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Right, well, you have to realize that this stuff is moving at 580 miles an hour.
unidentified		Yeah, but it's compressing against the wall of the building.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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 skiddon 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.
unidentified		Jamie McIntyre for CNN was right there live stating there was no significant wreckage of any sizable aircraft.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Right, there wasn't, which is what you would expect when a plane is very thin aluminum and the thing was going extremely quickly and it's hitting reinforced concrete.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		The energy involved is enormous.
unidentified		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?
unidentified		How do you get a plane to do a left turn nose in into a building?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		To be perfectly honest, we didn't deal with the lampstands.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		That's something that we might look at.
unidentified		It seems like the way you're doing the whole show here, you're not dealing with a lot of connecting dots here.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, our purpose in doing this, and I think I've said this before, but our purpose was not to tell the complete story.
		And what we did was we took what was repeated often.
		The lampstand one I've seen now since, but it's not one that's repeated very often.
		And I'll tell you that the highway is actually many hundreds of yards away from the Pentagon.
		And when the plane, you know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that's another one that if you were to do a follow-up might be worthy of exploration.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Sure, yeah.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, unfortunately, I don't have in front of me what the flight path of the plane was, so I can't say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it beliefed that it hit about 25 feet in front of the impact of the building?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that about where it hit?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And you see this in many other plane crashes.
		I mean, it's not just the plane crash of the Pentagon.
		I mean, remember ValueJet that went down in Florida.
		I mean, there's almost nothing left.
		And think of Flight 93 in Shankspoon.
		I mean, there's a perfect example.
		The thing buried itself over 30 feet underground.
		And all that was left, and there's a massive explosion when it hit the ground, were these tiny scraps of metal.
		Because the energy involved is enormous.
		I mean, it's many tons.
		It's equal to the energy of a plane hitting something solid.
		It's equal to many tons of TNT.
		And it's something that, I mean, I think there'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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank God indeed.
		All right, we are at the bottom of the hour, Ben, so hold tight.
		We've got another 30 minutes to go.
		Ben Chertoff is my guest from Popular Mechanics magazine, which took 16 of the most popular, prominent conspiratorial views and went to the scientists and the structural engineers and checked them out.
		And they simply didn't check out.
		From the high desert, I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified		The High Desert.
		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.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
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.
unidentified		Stand by.
unidentified		The End Oh, my God.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Great.
unidentified		He says, Art conspiracy proven.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Under Windows 95, Word program, set font to Windings, plug in QNY22, the tale of Flight 11, and see what symbols you see.
		This program was made in 1995.
		Have you seen that?
unidentified		I have.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I love those.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's like one of the ones that came out right afterwards.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, obviously there's no conspiracy there, but it's really funny.
		And of course, that doesn't work if you actually try it.
		Or I don't think it works.
		I haven't tried it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, then there's somebody else here who says, look, great program, but sorry, I like conspiracies too much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe there's some truth in that.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		They're fun, you know?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I love reading around this stuff, but I mean, this is 9-11 stuff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this is 9-11.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This isn't fun.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		And, yeah, and these are not your normal conspiracy.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is just too much, and there's too much evidence to the contrary to really make these work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		First time caller line, your turn with Ben Shertoff.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi there, Art.
		I'm a first-time caller.
		I've been listening to you for, I don't know, probably going on like nine years now.
		And I was compelled to call tonight because I really have to take issue with your guest and how he accuses others of sloppy journalism.
		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Be specific.
unidentified		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 is a lot of it.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		Well, supposedly, normally when that happens, and that's never happened, but normally when that happens, if jurisdiction is needed to be given over to the FBI, then the NTSB is still supposed to be involved, and they weren't involved.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Ben?
unidentified		So that's why they didn't find anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold on now, Ben.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, I'm not exactly sure where you're referring to our NTSB findings.
		I mean, it's probably over in the Flight 93 stuff, and they were on scene for quite a while going through the wreckage.
		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 train crash.
		This is a great example out.
		It's a tragic example, but it's also a good example.
		Out 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.
		And, I mean, that's just how it works.
		And, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's kind of what I've been telling you all night, really.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, the conspiracy is still going to be there.
		But, you know, the FBI 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Ben shirt off.
unidentified		Hi.
		Yes.
		Hi, Art.
		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 art, these are both groups that hate Bush.
		One hates the government.
		One has the likeness to, 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 the history channels or the Discovery Channels.
		The plane that went into the Pentagon banked to the left, lost its left wing, going 500 miles an hour.
		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 HELL is Barbara Olson?
		Is she just floating out there somewhere?
		I mean, these people are crazy, Art.
		Thank you.
		Thank you again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, and have a good night.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Ben Shiroff.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		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 the crime.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's only important, sir, because so many of these conspiracy guys are saying it didn't happen.
unidentified		Well, I know, but I have some other questions that aren't answered by either side of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's fine.
		That's fine.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Okay.
		My angle 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, University Cathedral in Los Angeles with Dr. Gene Scott in November of 2003.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Scott, rest his soul.
		Now, this phone call said what?
		What?
		All this was going to happen?
unidentified		Willie Brown got a phone call that said, don't fly to New York.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't fly to New York.
unidentified		Right.
		And now, I've read some other articles that said that there were a couple of officials that canceled their flights also on the 10th.
		The Attorney General began flying non-commercial Several weeks before 9-11.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's deal with all of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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, as a total breakdown in security.
		And it does look like there were certainly the clues there from what I've read.
		And this is not speaking to the story we did or our investigation, because this is really quite far outside of that scope.
		We really stuck to the physical claims.
		But I think what we've seen in both the 9-11 report and what's come out in the papers and the news and the sort of Richard Clark reports is that there were at least the clues there and the warnings.
		And I think what you take away from it is that before September 11th, there was a major communication breakdown in the federal government.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember some stories immediately, almost immediately after the event, indicating that there had been some stocks dumped.
		There was a big dump that went on.
		And that story was short-lived, really.
		It sort of went away.
		You have anything on that at all?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, we didn't really investigate that in depth at all, but we did.
		I mean, 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 the story puts it in the Chicago...
		I'm not exactly sure the specifics of the story, 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 stocks.
		But there was some 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 to trend.
		So a bunch of people dumped 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.
		And, you know, 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. All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on there with Ben Shiroff.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Good morning, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Hey, kudos.
		What a wonderful job.
		Thanks for bringing this fine man on your program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're very welcome.
unidentified		And I want to thank you, Ben, for reminding.
		I'm a former Marine Corps veteran, 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 posed an interesting question.
		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We should keep people in our business should be keeping an eye on the government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But that doesn't mean that everything that the government does is a conspiracy against the people.
unidentified		Exactly.
		But that is a question that does need to be addressed, you know, as far as that part of the process, why people are like this.
		And you yourself had a remarkable experience seeing some kind of a triangle craft.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		You know, and we have the agenda, the UFO agenda, of course, and our government's not talking about.
unidentified		And we have the agenda of the chemtrails our government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, these are all different.
unidentified		So I can understand why we have this kind of a situation here.
unidentified		And the freedom of mobility, I think, is the heart of the UFO matter because of the propulsion system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 Coast AM with Ben Shertoff.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, is this me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know.
unidentified		I'm one of the conspiracy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm one of the conspiracist theorists.
unidentified		Dick.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dick, I had to cut that out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We don't allow last names.
unidentified		Oh, I beg your pardon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So your name is Dick.
		We'll start over so we get it in.
		Your name is Dick.
unidentified		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, which we presume is a missile because it's too thick for contrail, heading toward the Pentagon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you think it was a missile, not an airplane?
unidentified		W I believe uh well, my s the the scenario that I I have, and Professor A. K. Doudney of uh who's an editor of Scientific American, the view is that the Pentagon, the the 757 was there, and it flew over the Pentagon and landed at Reagan National Airport only one mile away beyond.
unidentified		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.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Okay, then 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?
unidentified		Yes.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you what you have in there, of course, the nature of security cameras like that, to save data and to save space on whatever recording device you're using.
		It's not a full-motion video.
		So you've got, you know, I don't know how many frames per second that was, but it's, you know, less than, fewer than 30 frames a 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, besides, it wasn't F-16 parts in pieces or a missile from an F-16.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Or a black box from an F-16.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		None of that was true.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 hadn't made up their minds?
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I mean, I think they did a pretty Herculean task.
		It was certainly, it 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 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 overwhelming the amount of evidence that there is for the events played out the way most people really saw them played out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen, buddy, thank you for being on the program.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night, my friend.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
ben chertoff ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		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.
unidentified		Good night in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
		This magical journey will take us on a ride.
		Filled with the longing, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the sun shine on you?

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