SUNDAY STORYTIME - 05.05.24

Alternative Facts - 9/11 Revisited

I was working at ABC News in Washington, D.C. when the 9/11 attacks happened. As a journalist in that pivotal city, the attack is the most important story of my career. I reported countless stories in the aftermath about the government investigations and conclusions. I didn’t, and still don’t, believe a single one of them. I don’t know what really happened that day, but I know the 9/11 Commission official report is loaded with whitewash. A careful reading of that report will leave you with more questions than answers.

I recently wrote a fictional story of that day. Basing it on thousands of verifiable truths, my book titled “Alternative Facts” presents a fictional account of the 9/11 attacks that I believe is far closer to the truth than the official account. I’m not suggesting my story is really what happened, but it fits the known facts much more closely than the government version. My book Alternative Facts, available on Amazon, is intended both to entertain and to get you thinking about what really did happen that day. What follows is the Prologue and Chapter 1

Prologue

The terrorist attacks carried out against the United States on September 11, 2001, were stunning, grievous, a pivotal point in history and utterly devastating. Not only to the U.S., but to the rest of the world as well. They were also effective and, in many ways, successful. The younger generations of Americans cannot begin to understand how much life changed on that day. Al Qaeda, under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, wanted to strike the heart of the western world in a way that would curtail the freedoms its citizens enjoyed. Freedoms that he viewed as wicked and ungodly in the eyes of Islam, or more accurately, in the way that his eyes perceived Islam.

More than two decades later, the success of this goal is clear. The hastily approved PATRIOT Act was a direct response to the 9/11 attacks. It gave the government far-reaching authority to insert itself into the private lives of American citizens in ways so deep and unthinkable before, that the government now knows more about your life than you do. Flying from one city to another has become far more difficult than before 9/11, and the government intrusion into your travel plans has expanded exponentially. Unwelcome government invasion and control of your private life has expanded insidiously in so many ways that it would take a volume of books just to explore the subject. In response to this overwhelming loss of privacy, we shrug our shoulders, exclaim “Whaddya gonna do?” and go on with our lives, buying into the belief that everything is okay and we are now much safer from terrorism.

Perhaps all of that is necessary. Creating a safe and secure environment in which to live is often inconvenient. But accepting these curtailments of freedom would be far more palatable if the American people would be told the absolute truth about what happened on that day. Decades later, the full truth has yet to be told. The government created a 9/11 Commission 442 days after the attack. Twenty months later, that commission issued a nearly five-hundred-page report that purported to explain what had happened and how the government should respond.

The 9/11 Commission report is exactly like this book in one respect. Both are works of fiction peppered with just enough facts to obscure the omissions, unanswered questions and blatant fallacies. The official report would have you believe that beginner pilots with very limited skill sets, who had never even been in the cockpit of an airliner, were somehow able to exact pinpoint perfect attacks. It says that these, at best, amateur pilots who didn’t know the difference between the in-plane intercom and the radios used to contact air controllers miraculously knew how to override autopilots on massive airliners and fly them in complicated maneuvers that literally defy the laws of physics. It would have you believe the resulting fires when, as even the commission points out, the fuel load of the jets burned up in the first few seconds after impact, were amazingly able to burn so hot that they melted the steel structure of the World Trade Center towers. It would have you believe that the weight of the top 15 or so floors of those towers was enough to cause the entire 110 story buildings to cave in on themselves in seconds, all the way to the ground, with no resistance from the undamaged structure of the eighty-plus stories below. It would have you believe that World Trade Center Building Seven, a forty-seven-story office building next to the towers, collapsed straight down at freefall speed later that evening, because a few offices on 10 floors had caught fire and one support column, out of the 81 columns holding the building, collapsed. It would have you believe that two strikes on buildings that were designed to absorb the impact of an airliner brought down three buildings.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) joins in with some fantastical conclusions that, again, defy physics. The NIST report says the collapse of WTC 7 was due to “thermal expansion” of steel beams around that one support pillar. It never explains how the collapse of a single pillar near a corner of the building didn’t cause the building to crumple to the ground from this weak point, but rather caused the entire structure to drop straight downward in seconds. NIST also admits that it never even bothered to test for explosive residue in the remains of that building, thereby leaving that question forever unanswerable. The leaps of faith required to accept these conclusions, while ignoring the many questions never answered, or even asked, is just too much for any thinking person to accept.

I have read these official reports cover to cover numerous times over the years. I suspect few others have ever actually read them, despite the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report became a best-seller when it was released. As a journalist working in Washington, D.C. in those days, I conducted numerous interviews, read everything on the subject, and watched every video and documentary I could find.

Still, I do not know exactly what happened on 9/11. So many questions have gone unanswered. So many possibilities were never investigated. So many facts have been buried behind the vague wall known as National Security. So many false flags have been planted.

Again, this book is a work of fiction. It springboards from many true and verifiable facts into swirls of pure fiction designed to make you forget about where the story crosses that line. Here’s the thing; We don’t know where that line truly lies.

What the official reports of this event provide us is one possible scenario built upon so many unanswered questions, unexplained hypotheses and unreleased videos and other records, along with distortions of the laws of physics, that it opens the door for credible exploration of other elucidations.

I

2200 Hours 11 September 2001

He had followed orders. That’s what a military commander is supposed to do.

He was just doing his job. But as he stares at the TV screen showing the chaos, the fires, the collapsed buildings; as he ponders the loss of lives that he has caused; as he contemplates the grief and terror that he has unleashed on his own country, the shame is more than he can bear.

He slowly rises from his desk and walks to his office door, closing it ever so deliberately. Returning to his desk, he sits down to write one final letter. For two minutes he stares at the piece of paper in front of him. It is blank, save for the official seal and his name printed on the letterhead. Finally, deciding there simply are no words to describe this moment, he puts the paper away, and stabs the pen back into its stand.

As his right hand reaches down to unholster his Beretta M9 service pistol, his breathing and nerves are remarkably calm. He had followed orders. But those orders have led to this. Pressing the barrel of the M9 deep into the soft flesh under his jaw, he closes his eyes.

Colonel Martin Grayson knows his place, and he knows it well. As an O-6 officer in the United States Air Force, Grayson is as accustomed to giving orders as he is to taking them. Not quite tall enough, with thinning hair and a rounded face that sags into a double chin, Colonel Grayson has always felt that he had to work it a little bit harder than everyone else to command the respect his position deserves. Though he would never speak of it to anyone, this inner self-doubt has served him well. With a singular dedication to serving his country, this patriot from the frosty farmlands of western Minnesota has clawed his way up the chain of command, to find himself in charge of a secretive group of airmen whose job is to protect the capital of the free world. His National Defense Airspace Ready Team (N-DART) operates so far under the radar that it doesn’t even have an identifying plaque outside its door in the Pentagon B-3 basement.

Brave men of action might consider this to be a boring assignment. After all, the only threat that ever happens in the skies over Washington, D.C. is some rookie pilot accidentally flying his Cessna into the restricted airspace around the city. Scrambling a couple of jets out of Langley Air Force Base to scare the shit out of him is about as exciting as things ever get around here. Most days are filled with routine simulations and bullshit paperwork. But for Colonel Grayson, being responsible for protecting the most important city in the world has been an honorable assignment that has made him proud. Until today.

He had followed orders.

As a result of those orders, The World Trade Center towers in New York have been reduced to smoldering heaps of broken steel, glass, and concrete. And death. On the Virginia banks of the Potomac River, the Pentagon, the very building he is now sitting in, has taken a hit that reduced a huge section on the other side of the massive headquarters of America’s military might into a twisted mass of destruction.

In a few hours’ time, on a sunny and warm September morning, the greatest nation on the planet has been rattled to its very essence. And it happened for one reason. He had followed orders.

The carnage on that day officially claims 2,977 lives. At this moment, Colonel Martin Grayson, United States Air Force, can’t know that number.  But when he squeezes the trigger on his Beretta, the true death toll rises by one.

He will not be among the counted.

The rest of the story plays out in my book Alternative Facts, and I hope you snag a copy.