9/11 Quotes

"For those who might question the reasoning and importance for re-examining the [9/11] Commission's report, the events that led up to and the day of September 11th, one only has to recall the enormous ramifications that the attacks of September 11th have had on our country. ...[Only] an honest re-evaluation of how the 9/11 attacks could have happened will allow us to reverse the adverse consequences of overreaching laws and the existing loop holes in our security systems in order to allow us to be safer in the future." [download full briefing]

WITNESSES

William Rodriguez

WTC janitor who single-handedly rescued fifteen people

" When I heard the sound of the explosion, the floor beneath my feet vibrated, the walls started cracking and it everything started shaking... Seconds after the first massive explosion below in the basement still rattled the floor, I hear another explosion from way above ... Although I was unaware at the time, this was the airplane hitting the tower, it occurred moments after the first explosion ... I know there were explosives placed below the trade center. I helped a man to safety who is living proof, living proof the government story is a lie and a cover-up. ... The skin was hanging off his hands and arms. His injuries couldn't have come from the airplane above, but only from a massive explosion below. I don't care what the government says, what scientists say. I saw a man burned terribly from a fire that was caused from an explosion below ... I have tried to tell my story to everybody, but nobody wants to listen. [read more]

Larry Silverstein

Owner (leaseholder) of the World Trade Center, speaking on the 2002 PBS documentary "America Rebuilds" about the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, which was not struck by any aircraft and had only minimal fires burning.

"I remember getting a call from the, uh, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘You know, we’ve had such terrible loss of life, may be the smartest thing to do is, is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse." [click here to watch] [Analysis of this quote]

SCIENTISTS AND SCHOLARS

David Ray Griffin, Ph.D.

Author of The New Pearl Harbor : Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11.

"It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government." [read more]

Prof. Steven E. Jones

Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University.

"The horizontal ejection of structural steel members for hundreds of feet and the pulverization of concrete to flour-like powder, observed clearly in the collapses of the WTC towers, provide further evidence for the use of explosives. [explained here] (See also, Griffin, 2004, chapter 2.) The observed plumes or "squibs" are far below the pulverization region and therefore deserving of particular attention. They appear much like the plumes observed in the controlled demolition of the Southwark Towers [see here] ... I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by impact damage and fires, but through the carefully planned use of explosives/incendiaries. I have presented ample evidence for the controlled-demolition hypothesis, which is testable and falsifiable and yet has not been seriously considered in any of the studies funded by the US government." [view entire paper here]

Kevin Ryan

Former employee of Underwriters Laboratories (the company that certified the steel in the WTC towers).

"We know that the steel components were certified to ASTM E119. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2000F for several hours. And as we all agree, the steel applied met those specifications. Additionally, I think we can all agree that even un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3000F (2). Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2000F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all." [read more]

Nila Sagadevan

Aeronautical engineer and pilot.

"There are some who maintain that the mythical 9/11 hijackers, although proven to be too incompetent to fly a little Cessna 172, had acquired the impressive skills that enabled them to fly airliners by training in flight simulators... According to FAA radar controllers, "Flight 77" then suddenly pops up over Washington DC and executes an incredibly precise diving turn at a rate of 360 degrees/minute while descending at 3,500 ft/min, at the end of which "Hanjour" allegedly levels out at ground level. Oh, I almost forgot to mention: He also had the presence of mind to turn off the transponder in the middle of this incredibly difficult maneuver ... The maneuver was in fact so precisely executed that the air traffic controllers at Dulles refused to believe the blip on their screen was a commercial airliner. Danielle O'Brian, one of the air traffic controllers at Dulles who reported seeing the aircraft at 9:25 said, "The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane." [read more]

Rodger Herbst

Bachelor of aeronautical and astronautical engineering and mechanical engineer.

"Any chain reaction theory would have to accommodate the fact that each of the towers unraveled completely in less than 15 seconds, which is close to the time of free fall from the top of the buildings if there had been no intervening solid structure. How could a mechanical process proceed through 100 floors with such speed?" [read more]

NATIONAL SECURITY EXPERTS

Dr. Robert M. Bowman

Head of Advanced Space Programs for DOD, Lt.Col for United States Air Force (ret.)

"Why weren't the hijacked airliners intercepted by jet fighters and shot down before they could fly into the WTC and Pentagon? Standard procedures call for any airliner that loses radio contact or goes off course to be intercepted. Four airliners were hijacked almost simultaneously, and it was obvious to air traffic controllers immediately. The transponders on the airliners were turned off. The hijackers were heard on the radio. And the four deviated drastically from their assigned courses. Was NORAD told? If not, why not? What did the air traffic controllers say, and to whom? Why did the FBI impound the tapes of those conversations? Why has the public never been told what was on them? Why weren't the congressional investigators told? The independent commission? Who is hiding what, and why? If it was just a matter of incompetence or somebody not doing their job, why hasn't anyone been fired or reprimanded? If someone ordered the standdown, who? and why? and why haven't they been charged with treason?" [read more]

25 Veteran National Intelligence Officers

A letter to the 9/11 Commission signed by FBI, military, and intelligence veterans.

"Omission is one of the major flaws in the Commission’s report. We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention. Serious problems and shortcomings within government agencies likewise were reported to the Commission but were not included in the report. The report simply does not get at key problems within the intelligence, aviation security, and law enforcement communities. The omission of such serious and applicable issues and information by itself renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations." [read entire letter]

George Nelson

Colonel, USAF (ret.)

"In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft -- and in most cases the precise cause of the accident. This is because every military and civilian passenger-carrying aircraft have many parts that are identified for safety of flight. That is, if any of the parts were to fail at any time during a flight, the failure would likely result in the catastrophic loss of aircraft and passengers. Consequently, these parts are individually controlled by a distinctive serial number and tracked by a records section of the maintenance operation and by another section called plans and scheduling ... The government alleges that four wide-body airliners crashed on the morning of September 11 2001, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 human beings, yet not one piece of hard aircraft evidence has been produced in an attempt to positively identify any of the four aircraft. On the contrary, it seems only that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view. The hard evidence would have included hundreds of critical time-change aircraft items, plus security videotapes that were confiscated by the FBI immediately following each tragic episode." [read more]

POLITICIANS, POLITICAL COMMENTATORS, AND INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS

Daniel Ellsberg

Former American military analyst who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. Military's account of activities during the Vietnam War, to the New York Times.

"...there’s no question in my mind that there’s enough evidence there to justify a very comprehensive and hard hitting investigation of a kind that we’ve not seen, with subpoenas, general questioning of people, and raising the release of a lot of documents, there’s no question that (D.E. chuckles) put it this way, very serious questions have been raised, about how much they knew beforehand and how much involvement there may been. Is the, is a administration capable, humanly and physiologically of engineering such a provocation?

Yes, I would say that, I worked for such an administration myself, Johnson, ah, President Johnson put destroyers in harm’s way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had." [read more]

William Sloan Coffin, Jr.Liberal Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist of international stature.

"Professor David Ray Griffin is a retired theologian with a well deserved reputation for the thoroughness of his research. Shocked by 9/11 and its subsequent related events, he not only pored over various American articles, but beyond that, investigated English, French, German and other European and Asian interpretations of the same event. The result consists of exceedingly provocative questions with implied answers quite at variance with Washington official accounts! All Americans who love their country enough to dig into the facts of these critical times will be well rewarded by examining Professor Griffin's books, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omisions and Distortions. 9/11 Truth is a very important issue with the power to bring lasting change to our country."
[read more]

Michael Meacher

British member of Parliament and former environment minister

"The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20 a.m, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06 a.m. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC , until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate." [read more]

Andreas Von Buelow

Former assistant German defense minister, director of the German Secret Service, minister for research and technology, and member of Parliament for 25 years.

"At 9 11, four planes for two hours were able to drive around, fly around even one hour in the direction going toward the west and then turn around and then comeback. The military air force was not able to interdict them. It's [un]imaginable." [read more]

Paul Craig Roberts

Former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury

"I haven't looked at it very close, but I did go to Georgia Tech and I did learn some physics and I know enough physics to know that it is strictly impossible for those buildings to collapse in their own footprint, at free-fall speed except under controlled demolition. Those buildings did not come down the way the 9-11 report says. It is strictly impossible, in fact, it's a total, the account in the 911 report is a total contradiction to the laws of physics." [read more]

Dr. Morgan Reynolds

Professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, former chief economist at the Department of Labor

"The fundamental difficulty is not really disbelief about the ability to keep conspiracy secrets but disbelief that U.S. government officials could really collaborate in attacking America and take all those innocent lives at the World Trade Center. This is naïve. First, government is the instrument of social compulsion. Organized force is what government does. The belief that soft-hearted people rise to the top in government is akin to the belief that softies were whipping masters on slave plantations. [read more]

OTHER QUOTABLE COMMENTS

Dr. S. Shyam Sunder, (head of NIST)

A quote from a Mark Jacobson New York Magazine article (March 21, 2006) entitled "The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll"

"I asked Dr. Sunder about 7 WTC. Why was the fate of the building barely mentioned in the final report? This was a matter of staffing and budget, Sunder said. He hoped to release something on 7 WTC by the end of the year. NIST did have some “preliminary hypotheses” on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. “We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors.” Then Dr. Sunder paused. “But truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.” [read more]