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Major General Smedley Butler, among the most celebrated of all Marines, wrote WAR IS A RACKET, complaining about the abuse of the military for the benefit of corporations. A former USMC artillery officer, who founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, submitted this article to the Marine Corps GAZETTE, which it would not publish. This is a lesson every Marine, even every American, deserves to know about the profit motive driving wars.
Madison, WI (OpEdNews) 12 September 2007 - Smedley Butler didn't like for the Marine Corps to be abused, and neither do I. Indeed, I can't think of a more serious issue than whether or not Uncle Sam is taking advantage of us to benefit the profit margins of American corporations, the very charge alleged in his book, War is a Racket. Today those corporations even include Halliburton, whose former CEO is well-positioned to benefit it from the inside as Vice President of the United States. Is there any reason to think that history is repeating itself and the Corps is being abused once again?
The fuse that ignited the conflagrations in Iraq and in Afghanistan was 9/11, which, according to the official account presented in The 9/11 Commission Report, was carried out by 19 Islamic fundamentalists, who hijacked four commercial airliners and outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world in order to commit these atrocities under the control of a man in a cave in Afghanistan. If you don't want to believe in a conspiracy theory, you had better reject the official account, because it only takes two persons acting in concert to commit an illegal act to qualify as a ‘conspiracy’. This is one.
After resigning my commission as Captain, USMC, in 1966, I earned a Ph.D. in the history and the philosophy of science. I would spend 35 years teaching courses in logic critical thinking, and scientific reasoning. Along the way, I would become deeply involved in research on the assassination of JFK and publish three collections of studies by experts on that case. Then, in 2005, I would found a non-partisan society of students, experts, and scholars devoted to exposing falsehoods and revealing truths about 9/11, which is known as Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Our membership includes aeronautical engineers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, pilots, physicists, and even some philosophers and theologians committed to the truth.
Anyone who doubts the breadth and depth of interest in 9/11 from many professionals should visit http://patriotsquestion911.com, where you can find bio sketches and statements from 110+ Senior Military, Intelligence Service, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials, 200+ Engineers and Architects, 50+ Pilots and Aviation Professionals, 150+ Professors, 180+ Survivors and Family Members, and 90+ Entertainment and Media Professionals. Anyone who tells you that the 9/11 truth movement is a ‘lunatic fringe’ does not know what they are talking about. Check it out for yourself!
If the official account of the events of 9/11 were true, of course, then it should be very difficult or even impossible to disprove it. That would require using biased or manufactured evidence, for example, to create a false impression. It would be very odd if much or most of what we have been told about 9/11 were false. It may come as some surprise, therefore, to learn that members of Scholars, building upon prior research by earlier students of 9/11, have established more than a dozen disproofs of the official government account, the truth of any one of which is enough to show that the government's account -- in one or another of its multiple guises -- cannot possibly be correct. Consider the following points:
o The impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very similar to those they were designed to withstand, and they continued to stand after those impacts with negligible effects.
o The melting point of steel at 2,800F is about 1,000F higher than the maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800F under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt, which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down.
o Underwriters Laboratory certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000F for three or four hours before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and too briefly at an average temperature of less than 500F -- about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the North -- to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt.
o If the steel had melted or weakened, the affected floors would have displayed completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition that was observed.
o William Rodriguez, the senior custodian in the North Tower and the last man to leave the building, has reported massive explosions in the subbasements that effected extensive destruction, including the demolition of a 50-ton hydraulic press and ripping the skin off a fellow worker, a report corroborated by the testimony of more than two dozen other custodians.
o Willie reported that the explosion occurred prior to the airplane's impact, a claim that has now been substantiated in a new study by Craig Furlong and Gordon Ross in their "Seismic Proof: 9/11 was an Inside Job", which demonstrates that these explosions actually took place as much as 14 and 17 seconds prior to the airplanes impacts.
o Heavy steel construction buildings like the Twin Towers, built with more than 100,000 tons of steel, are not even capable of "pancake collapse", which normally only occurs with concrete structures of "lift slab" construction and could not occur in "redundant" welded-steel buildings, such as the towers, unless every supporting column were removed at the same time, as Charles Pegelow, a structural engineer, has pointed out to me.
o The destruction of the Twin Towers in approximately 10 seconds apiece is even faster than free fall with only air resistance, which would have taken at least 12 seconds, which, as Judy Wood, a former professor of mechanical engineering, has emphasized, is an astounding result that would have been impossible without extremely powerful explosives.
o The towers are exploding from the top, not collapsing to the ground, where the floors do not move, a phenomenon that Judy Wood has likened to two gigantic trees turning to sawdust from the top down, which, like the pulverization of the concrete, the official account cannot possibly explain.
o WTC-7 came down in a classic controlled demolition at 5:20 PM/ET after owner Larry Silverstein suggested the best thing to do might be to ‘pull it’, displaying all the characteristics of classic controlled demolitions, including a complete, abrupt, and total collapse into its own footprint, where the floors are all falling at the same time, and so forth, an event so embarrassing to the government it is not even mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report.
o The hit point at the Pentagon was too small to accommodate a 100-ton airliner with a 125-foot wingspan and a tail that stands 44 feet above the ground; the kind and quantity of debris was wrong for a Boeing 757: no wings, no fuselage, no seats, no bodies, no luggage, no tail! Which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
o The Pentagon's own videotape does not show a Boeing 757 hitting the building, as even Bill O'Reilly admitted when it was shown on "The O'Reilly Factor"; but at 155 feet, the plane was more than twice as long as the 77-foot Pentagon is high and should have been present and visible; it was not, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
o Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed black box data allegedly from the Pentagon plane and discovered that it contradicts the official account in direction, approach, and altitude: it was 300 feet too high to have taken out the lampposts and 100 feet too high to have hit the building itself.
o The aerodynamics of flight would have made the official trajectory -- flying at high speed barely above ground level -- physically impossible; and if it had come it at an angle instead, it would have created a massive crater; but there is no crater and the government has no way out, which means that the building was not hit by a Boeing 757!
o If Flight 93 had come down as advertised, then there would have been a debris field of about a city block in size, but in fact the debris is distributed over an area of about eight square miles, which would be explainable if the plane had been shot down in the air but not if it had crashed as required by the government's official scenario.
When you stop to think about it, the differences between the temperatures at which these fires burned and the duration of their burning means that it is not even physically possible that the steel weakened, much less melted. And the aerodynamics of flight make it impossible for a Boeing 757 to have taken the official flight path toward the Pentagon. Those of us who have investigated the official account and discovered that it cannot possibly be true, I would suggest, are not conspiracy theorists but conspiracy realists.
Indeed, no steel structure, high rise building ever fell as a result of fire either before 9/11 or after 9/11 -- nor, if our research is well-founded, on 9/11. While we cannot rebuild the Twin Towers to conduct experiments, history did that for us. In February 1975, a huge fire broke out on the 11th floor of the North Tower. Its temperatures reached 2,000 degrees and it consumed 2/3 of the floor, including enveloping the core. It burned for three hours. And yet none of the steel had to be replaced.
There are more, especially about the alleged hijackers, including that they were not competent to fly the planes; that their names were not on the passenger manifests; that they were not subject to autopsy; that several have turned up alive and well; that the cell phone calls could not have been made; on and on. You will have heard so many contrary reports through the mass media, however, that I cannot expect you to believe what I am telling you without checking it out. Try http://www.911scholars.org or our new book, The 9/11 Conspiracy, for a start.
Most Americans, including most Marines, are unaware that George W. Bush, in response to a reporter's question about Saddam Hussein's connection to 9/11, answered with the single word, ‘Nothing!”’Or that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the administration's claim that Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaeda and discovered that he was actually tracking down its leaders to incarcerate or even kill them!
Better yet, did you know tha Ed Hass of The Muckraker Report discovered that the FBI's ‘wanted’ poster for Osama bin Laden did not include any reference to the crimes of 9/11? When he inquired, he was told by Rex Tomb that the reason the FBI's ‘wanted’ poster for Osama bin Laden did not include any reference to the events of 9/11 is because the FBI has ‘no hard evidence’ that connects him to the events of 9/11.
Our thought is that, if Saddam was not responsible for 9/11 and if Osama was not responsible for 9/11, then exactly who was responsible for the death of 3,000 civilians? We believe it is the highest form of respect to those who died and their survivors to determine how and why they died, which our government has not told us. And, as a former Marine Corps' officer, I am also motivated by the same concerns that affected Smedley Butler. We are entitled to know the real reasons we are asked to risk our lives. Corporate profits are not enough.
Founder
Scholars for 9/11 Truth