CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERMONT'S CONGESSIONAL DELEGATION

I.  Correspondence with U.S. Representative Peter Welch

A. Frank Haddleton to Peter Welch, May 7, 2007

Frank B. Haddleton

Attorney at Law

270 College Street

Burlington , VT   05401

May 7, 2007

Dear Congressman Welch:

            The FAA did not suddenly forget, on 9/11/2001, how to notify NORAD that aircraft had deviated from their flight plans and stopped communicating.  All of those military officials were not lying when they reported, just after 9/11, a sequence of events that would have enabled them to intercept the wayward aircraft.  In the absence of explosives, upper floors cannot crash through 80 or 90 undamaged floors of a steel-framed high-rise building in only one second more than it would take them to fall through thin air.  WTC 7, the 47-story skyscraper that was not struck by any aircraft and that collapsed into its own footprint at free-fall speed did not just commit suicide.  In 2001, cell phones did not function during commercial flights.  An inexperienced pilot who could not qualify to rent a small Cessna shortly before 9/11 could not have flown the 757 that allegedly struck the Pentagon through the extraordinary maneuver that most commercial pilots say they themselves couldn’t have performed.  A 757 could not have crashed into the Pentagon, leaving essentially no identifiable wreckage and causing a perfectly round exit hole (and still no identifiable remains) three rings inside the building, stopping all clocks and watches about five minutes before the crash.  A commercial airliner that was not fired upon could not have left an 8-mile long debris field and many witnesses reporting a missile strike before crashing into the ground in Pennsylvania .  Not a single aspect of the official story of 9/11 (a/k/a the “Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory”, which is that the attacks of 9/11 were brought about exclusively by Arab terrorists) is believable when the facts and the laws of physics are considered.

            Some believe that there is no need to consider whether or not the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory is false, because it’s just not possible that individuals within our government could have been complicit.  As justification for this view, they cite a priori arguments, such as:  1) People in our government would never do such a thing;  2)  A huge number of people would have had to have been involved and one of them would have talked already;  3)  These “conspiracy theories” have already been fully debunked by independent investigations;  4)  Our mainstream media would have exposed this crime before now;  5) The Bush Administration is too incompetent to have been involved in the 9/11 attacks.  All of these a priori arguments have very effective rebuttals, including those indicated on the back side of this letter     

            The more important point is that a priori arguments can never take precedence over empirical evidence.  If somebody gives us a memorandum signed by the president of an American tobacco company showing the company’s knowledge that cigarettes cause cancer and advising company employees to conceal this knowledge, we cannot ignore that evidence on the grounds that “no American company would knowingly endanger the lives of millions of innocent people”.  The same situation could arise with evidence that a religious leader raped a child, or evidence that a mild-mannered close friend committed a violent crime.  As in these cases, a priori arguments cannot justify ignoring empirical evidence that the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory is false.

            The enclosed new book by David Ray Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, presents overwhelming evidence that the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory is false.  I implore you to suspend all a priori judgments for just long enough to read it.  Even Senator Leahy has suggested that Bush allowed 9/11 to happen, but the evidence indicates far worse.  I would like to hear from you with your thoughts.  Thank you in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Frank B. Haddleton

Responses to the a priori arguments against questioning the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory include (without limitation) the following. 

1)  Governments have engaged in false-flag attacks (attacks on their own citizens under the name of others) throughout history in order to gain support for their agendas.  There is nothing so exceptional about our own government that puts such behavior beyond possibility. 

2)  Covert operations are conducted with compartmentalization and on a need-to-know basis, such that the actual number of knowingly complicit individuals may be extremely small, and even huge operations, such as the Manhattan Project, have been kept completely secret for years.  Individuals who may have been knowingly complicit in the 9/11 attacks would consider themselves heroes, with the motives for a 9/11-like event having been clearly spelled out in a paper entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” promulgated in 2000 by the neo-con Project for a New American Century.  It is not possible to comment on the effectiveness of keeping secret the unknown numbers of covert operations that have been carried out by agencies of our government and that we have never learned about.

3)  All of the official investigations supporting the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory have been performed under the ultimate direction of the Bush administration, and all of them have failed to address impossibilities in the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.  FEMA (which even concluded that its best hypothesis about the collapse of WTC 7 had “a low probability of occurrence”) is controlled by the Bush Administration.  The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the directors of NIST are all Bush appointees.  The 9/11 Commission was under the direction of Philip Zelikow, who is very much a Bush insider.  The senior researcher for the Popular Mechanics debunking was Benjamin Chertoff, cousin of Michael Chertoff, who was appointed by Bush to lead the new Department of Homeland Security. 

4) Until very recently, our mainstream media never challenged Bush’s claims about Iraqi WMD or about his many other lies.

5)  Involvement of the Bush administration in 9/11 would not be on the scale of a FEMA response and would not have any of the bureaucratic bungling that we have come to expect.  It would be a small, carefully planned and executed tactical operation, more like the initial, highly successful, military strikes at the start of the military invasion of Iraq .

For more information, please visit www.vt911.org

C. Frank Haddleton to Peter Welch, June 18, 2007

Frank B. Haddleton

Attorney at Law

270 College Street

Burlington , VT   05401

June 18, 2007

U.S. Representative Peter Welch

30 Main Street

Burlington , Vermont 05401

Dear Congressman Welch:

            I appreciate your letter of June 1, 2007  in response to my letter to you of May 7, 2007.  I enclose copies of both of these letters for your easy reference.

            However, with all due respect, I suggest to you that, contrary to your claim, the 9/11 Commission did not succeed in “accurately researching and documenting the events of that terrible day”.  The hundreds of omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission are obvious to all who review the facts, and an entire book has been devoted to these omissions and distortions.[1]  I would be more than happy to provide you with a copy of this book if you would read it. 

            Thomas H. Kean, co-Chair of the Commission, said, in reference to the multiple, mutually exclusive explanations for the failure of our air defenses: "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," ... "It was just so far from the truth. . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."[2]  According to Commission member (and former Senator) Bob Kerrey, CIA Director George Tenet said that the Commission members would be able to be present for interviews with accused detainees at Guantanamo “over my dead body”[3].  The Bush Administration fought the creation of the 9/11 Commission for more than a year, and its stonewalling of the investigation is well-documented.  Bush and Cheney even refused to speak with the Commission except in each other’s presence, without being under oath, and without any transcripts of the discussion being made.  We all recognize in other contexts that unwillingness to testify under oath strongly suggests a major problem.  The same logical conclusion applies to 9/11.

            Even Senator Leahy has acknowledged that the 9/11 Commission failed in its official purpose.  Here is what he said in an interview with Amy Goodman just last fall:  "And, of course, the two questions that the Congress would not ask, because the Republicans won't allow it, is, why did 9/11 happen on George Bush's watch when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen? And secondly, when they had Osama bin Laden cornered, why didn't they get him? Had there been an independent congress, one that could ask questions, these questions would have been asked years ago. We'd be much better off. We would have had the answers to that. I think with those answers, we would not have the fiasco we have in Iraq today, we would have caught Osama bin Laden , Afghanistan would be a more stable place, and the world would be safer."[4]  Well, Mr. Welch (and Mr. Leahy), we voters have given you back the independent Congress.  So what are we waiting for?

            As only one example of the omissions of the 9/11 Commission, consider World Trade Center Building 7 (“WTC 7”), a 47-story steel-framed skyscraper within the World Trade Center complex.  Though it was not struck by an aircraft, it collapsed suddenly, symmetrically and at free-fall speed into its own footprint at 5:20 p.m. on the afternoon of 9/11.  FEMA, after studying this collapse but refusing to consider the possibility of controlled demolition, concluded that its “best hypothesis”, a fire-induced collapse, had “a low probability of occurrence”.  Dr. Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which also investigated this collapse, when asked why WTC 7 collapsed, said "Truthfully, I don't really know.  We've had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7."  [5]  The 9/11 Commission, in its 571-page final report, said absolutely nothing about this truly astonishing collapse, an event that if not a controlled demolition was completely unprecedented in world history, with the exception of the collapses of the twin towers earlier that day.

            Basic high school physics[6] tells us that WTC 7 could not have collapsed at free-fall speed in the absence of pre-planted explosives, or some equivalent technology.  Steel columns and structures simply cannot fall through themselves at the same rate they would fall through thin air unless some process is at work to knock out the lower material at or before the time the higher material reaches it. 

            Basic high school physics also tells us that in the absence of pre-planted explosives, or some equivalent technology, the twin towers could not have collapsed in the very short times they took to collapse.  The 9/11 Commission says that the South Tower collapsed in 10 seconds (p. 305), and the visual, audio and seismographic evidence indicates times at or very close to that.  Free-fall speed in a vacuum would be 9.2 seconds[7].  76 undamaged floors in the case of the South Tower , or 92 in the case of the North Tower , would have slowed the fall of the top portion of the tower down to a fall rate dramatically slower than one second, or even ten seconds or twenty seconds, short of free-fall speed.   Many physicists have calculated that the undamaged floors would have actually arrested the collapses.

            An equally obvious and fatal problem with the official story of the collapses is that most of the material components of the three towers (other than the steel), as well as the contents of the towers, were pulverized into a fine dust that blanketed a large part of lower Manhattan.  Steel beams were ejected hundreds of feet horizontally.  This pulverization and ejection required an enormous amount of energy.  If this energy came from the collisions of the floors in a purely gravitational collapse, then this is evidence that these collisions involved enormous resistance that would have dramatically slowed – or even arrested – the collapses.  To state it the other way around, if the collisions of the floors provided essentially no resistance, as the official story (that there were no explosives) requires us to believe, then these near-zero resistance collisions could not have caused the pulverization and ejection that occurred.  You can’t have both (1) near-zero resistance and (2) enormous, pulverizing energy coming from the collisions of the floors.  Again, it’s just basic high school physics. 

            There are many other problems with the official story as it relates to the collapses, problems too numerous to mention here.  I’ll just mention one more, the pools of molten metal found at the basement levels of the three collapsed towers.  Even government investigators admit that the fires in the buildings were not hot enough to liquefy steel, and they are confounded by the pools of molten metal.  High-temperature explosive reactions, such as the thermate reaction, could and do explain the molten metal. 

            I am responding to your statement that “credible new evidence regarding the attacks must be considered” by enclosing a new (May, 2007) paper by Steven E. Jones, PhD, entitled “Revisiting 9/11/2001 – Applying the Scientific Method.”  I trust that you will read this article since it presents credible new evidence regarding the attacks.  Again, however, those of us who have seriously considered the facts relating to 9/11 already know two things:  1) The 9/11 Commission completely failed in its official mission;  2) The overwhelming evidence establishes that the official story of 9/11 is false.  I implore you, again, to read the new book that I provided to you with my letter of May 7, 2007, David Ray Griffin ’s “Debunking 9/11 Debunking”.  I suggest to you that one cannot read this book and continue to believe the official story of 9/11.

            I also implore you to consider the material available and linked at the website of Vermonters for a Real 9/11 Investigation, www.vt911.org, including the links to the large and growing lists of prominent engineers, architects, physicists, pilots, intelligence experts and professionals and academics of all disciplines who have stated their doubts about, and disbelief of, the official 9/11 story.  The horse that is 9/11 Truth is out of the barn, and it will no longer suffice to keep trying to close the barn doors.

            There is absolutely no legitimate basis for refusing to even consider the evidence establishing that the official 9/11 story is false.  As you say in your letter, it is essential that we understand how these attacks happened and how to prevent future such events.   If only a small fraction of the apparent problems with the official story is supported by this evidence, then I suggest to you that this is a matter of greater importance than any other matter that could possibly be on your agenda. 

            Again, basic high school physics tells us that the official 9/11 story is false.

            I look forward to your personal response to this letter.

Yours sincerely and respectfully,

Frank B. Haddleton

FBH:ms  / enclosure

cc:

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders

U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich

U.S. Representative Ron Paul

Vermont Speaker of the House Gaye Symington

John Briggs, Burlington Free Press

Ken Picard, Seven Days

Peter Freyne, Seven Days

Ross Sneyd, Vermont Public Radio

and many others

September 26, 2007

Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building  Washington, DC  20510

  Dear Senator Leahy:

            Earlier this year, the NTSB released its computer animation of the final minutes of the flight path of American Airlines Flight 77[1], the flight that allegedly struck the Pentagon on 9/11/2001.  This animation shows with extreme clarity that Flight 77 was on the wrong path (longitude and latitude) to have done the damage inside or outside the Pentagon. 

            The data from Flight 77’s flight data recorder also show that Flight 77 was nearly 300 feet too high to have struck the Pentagon[2]. 

            Two Pentagon police officers say they are absolutely certain that they saw the 757 approaching the Pentagon on 9/11 pass over north of the Citgo gas station[3], on the NTSB path, not on the path of destruction. 

            Flight 77 allegedly struck the Pentagon at 9:37:45 on 9/11/01, just about the time indicated by the flight data recorder.  However, unsynchronized, battery-operated clocks and wristwatches that were permanently stopped at the Pentagon all show times more than five minutes earlier.  In fact, the Navy website[4] and the Smithsonian website[5] both feature stopped clocks showing this earlier time.  The Smithsonian website even says, about its stopped clock, “…apparently this clock was six minutes slow.”  Common sense tells us that the clocks at the heart of the world’s most advanced military operation are not several minutes slow, indicating instead a highly destructive event more than five minutes before the alleged crash of Flight 77. 

            How does this evidence square with the official 9/11 story?  The FBI and NTSB refuse to comment.  I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

Frank B. Haddleton
cc:  A bodaciously large number of Vermont residents and media professionals

Also see material at:  http://www.vtcommons.org/node/565