911review.org: Trojan Horse

The website 911Review.org appeared in September of 2003, and quickly gained prominence with the help of thousands of links from other websites purporting to expose the falsity of the official account of the 9/11/2001 attack. To many skeptics of that account, the site appeared to fulfill an important function: providing a clearinghouse of information and links to ongoing research on the 9/11/01 attack. However, a critical reading of the site supports a different view: that it functions as a Trojan Horse, discrediting the case that the attack was a false-flag operation by loudly embracing that conclusion while supporting it with only specious arguments.

This site deconstructs 911Review.org to disentangle the myth from the reality. It examines the pages of 911Review.org from the point of view of a reader attempting to learn about the attack for the first time, whose experience will be very different from readers who have already accepted the premise that the attack was an inside job. This site also examines some of the subconscious messages in the pages of 911Review.org.

This page provides an overview of our analysis of 911Review.org. More specific comments are found on marked-up copies of pages from 911review.org. (See "Top Topics" on left.) The pages were cached over a 10-day period in late January, 2004. They include all of the pages listed under "Top Topics" and most of the local pages they linked to.

Contents

• 911Review.org Preaches to the Choir
• 911Review.org Filters out Crucial Information
  • 911Review.org Avoids Quality Sites
  • 911Review.org Avoids the Best Evidence
  • 911Review.org Buries the Core of the Crime
• 911Review.org Discredits Vital Research
  • 911Review.org Features Ludicrous Theories
  • 911Review.org is Full of Specious Arguments
  • 911Review.org Makes Over-Reaching Claims
  • 911Review.org Mis-Characterizes Key Evidence
• 911Review.org is Dishonest
• 911Review.org is Treacherous
• Conclusion

Many of the pages begin with a large image, such as Osama bin Laden standing behind the President's podium and George W. Bush with a turban and beard.

If you read the text of the pages, you will find that Osama bin Laden is consistently referred to as "OsamaBinAsset", the alleged hijackers as "HijackersPatsies", the media as "McMedia", and George W. Bush as "President [sic]".

To reader who accepts the premise that the attack was engineered by people inside the U.S. government, these devices will likely elicit a chuckle and subconsciously reinforce the idea that 911Review.org is on their side, going to bat against the murderous engineers of this scam. Such readers will have to approach the site critically to understand its effect on newcomers to the idea that the attack was a scam, who will likely be persuaded only that the authors of 911Review.org, -- or worse, all skeptics of the official story -- are ideologues who put politics ahead of logic and science.

911Review.org describes its goal as providing a succinct summary of the current research and conclusions, that can be used as a point of reference for people in the media or decision makers. It claims that it "summarizes the most important aspects of the current research, and cascades down through summaries to more detailed reviews".

The scope and structure of the site reinforce the idea that it attempts to summarize and link to the breadth of sites with important contributions to understanding 9/11/01. It is therefore interesting that 911Review.org chooses to avoid even mentioning several prominent sites with major contributions to uncovering the means, motives, and methods behind the attack and cover-up.

• wtc7.net
• OilEmpire.us
• QuestionsQuestions.net
• StandDown.net

• AirForceStanddown fails to mention standard operating procedure.
• CoverupByWhiteHouse, the only page about George W. Bush's response to the crisis, omits mention of the eight or more minutes he stayed seated in the classroom after being informed that the second tower had been hit and the country was under attack.
• BinLadenConfession is about problems with the reliability of the translation of the confession videotape, failing to mention that the actor on the tape is, on close inspection, clearly not Osama bin Laden.
• HijackersPatsies, Hanjour,Hani, and other pages about the alleged hijackers fail to point out that none of them were good pilots. The New York Times quoted Hanjour's flight instructor as saying "I'm still amazed to this day that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all."
• Nowhere does 911Review.org mention that the flight-routes of the commandeered planes took them hundreds of miles from their targets, exposing them to certain interception had standard operating procedures been followed. That simple point would do far more to undermine the hijacking myth than all of 911Review.org's ramblings about the hijackers' identities, and their and bin Laden's connections to the U.S. government.
• Building7Collapse fails to point out that Building 7 fell straight down, that its rubble pile was tidily piled up almost entirely within its footprint, and that precisely synchronized and symmetric damage (controlled demolition) is required to avoid toppling.
• TwinTowers mis-describes the explosions of the towers, avoiding mentioning the volume to which the dust clouds swelled, and then debunks the idea the jet fuel can melt steel, when the official explanation is that the fires softened, not melted, the steel.

Concerning the heart of the attack, the buildings pulverized to dust and shredded steel at Ground Zero, 911Review.org is remarkably quiet for a site that pretends to embrace the physical evidence. You will find no photographs of Ground Zero, and few photographs of the buildings collapsing.

• The core of the attack -- the demolition of the Twin Towers -- rates only one page at the end of the outline, as if it is only a footnote. Also, by appearing after directory pages such as Sept11Websites and TrustedNewsSistes, it is removed from the part of the outline detailing the attack.
• The massive evidence destruction operation at Ground Zero is barely mentioned. As in the site at large, the anthrax attack gets top billing on the OngoingCoverup page.
• 911Review.org's weak page on the air defense stand-down, AirForceStanddown, is under OngoingCoverup and is dissociated from the myth of the hijackers. None of the several pages on bin Laden or the alleged hijackers refers to the stand-down, which completely undermines the hijacking story.
• 911Review.org avoids the subject of remote control, the Top Topics pages being free of any reference to it, even though it is the central element of the alternative to the hijacking myth.

• PentagonAttackFire maintains that super-fires lasting days burned at the Pentagon, and suggests that indicates a fire fueled by Depleted Uranium used in an attack vehicle warhead. The idea that DU was used in the attack, especially in large amounts, directly contradicts the idea that it was an inside job involving Pentagon insiders such as Donald Rumsfeld, since such an incident would easily contaminate the entire building.
• An absurd theory about a cylinder mounted under the South Tower plane is featured on the Flights pages and elsewhere. It is used on the Sept11Videos page to bury and discredit video evidence of the Twin Towers' demolition.

• The PriorKnowledge page concludes "the FBI knew in advance" because they raided an IT company hosting Muslim websites the week before.
• TwinTowersMach10 implies that the flyby of a bird in the foreground of a video of the South Tower collision is actually a "Mach 10" aircraft.
• Building7Collapse claims that a video shows that Building 7 was only superficially hit by debris when 1 and 2 collapsed; where the video shows only the upper 20 stories of the building's north face, and WTC 1 and 2 were to Building 7's south. 911Review.org fails to mention the evidence that does support the claim: aerial photographs of Ground Zero showing the extent of the Towers' heavy fallout.
• 911Review.org claims (in several places) that the damage to the Pentagon could only be caused by a warhead, when, in fact, the damage pattern is consistent with the crash of a Boeing 757.
• In PentagonPlaneRotor it claims that the engine rotor photographed at the Pentagon was too small to be a 757 engine by implying that only the much larger fans have streamliners, when in fact the smaller-diameter parts of engines behind the fans have them too. (Look at the tapered section just aft of the fan housing on any turbofan.)
• It makes the unfounded assertion that the plane that hit the South Tower looks too small to be a 767 and that the engine debris don't match, in Flights.
• In PentagonAttackLegend it claims that the maneuver performed by the plane approaching the Pentagon involved a 4.5-G turn, when in fact it was less than 1.35 Gs.
• ExperiencedSkeptics twists Von Bulow's statement that the attack involved "years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry" into a conclusion that it was "a massive operation by what we have been referring to as the military-industrial complex". This non-sequitur implies that the attack involved thousands of insiders, which would have made it virtually impossible to keep secret.

911Review.org claims it was "set up by a group of academics and former academics living in Canada", but the text certainly doesn't read like the work of scholars, particularly in the sciences. Scientists almost always take care to qualify their statements and avoid universal quantifiers, such as always or everything. In contrast, 911Review.org is filled with blanket statements, so unqualified that they can't possibly be true. The OngoingCoverup page is a case in point.

• The FrontPage claims that there were molten pools of steel in the basements of the Twin Towers five weeks after the attack, when in fact the excavation had barely begun, and it was still about five months before the evidence of previously molten steel would be discovered.
• The TwinTowers page claims "when the Twin Towers exploded, the fires had almost gone out", when in fact there were very serious -- though not structurally threatening -- fires in the North Tower when it collapsed.
• The FrontPage claims that there was "no airliner debris" at the Pentagon, an assertion clearly contradicted by photographs showing the area near the facade.
• The HijackersAliveAndWell page implies that it took the FBI 16 days to publish the list of 19 hijackers, when in fact they had done so within 72 hours of the attack.

911Review.org presents itself as speaking for the community of skeptics of the 9/11/01 official myth. See 911ReviewFaq. It pretends to be about reviewing research on the attack, when it appears to be designed to divert the reader from core realities of the attack, such as the World Trade Center demolition, and discredits good research by associating it with absurd theories and sloppy analysis.

Many of the claims on the About page are at odds with the actual content of the site.

• 911Review.org claims that it summarizes the most important aspects of the current research, when in fact it censors the most important research, such as analysis of the energy requirements to expand the dust clouds generated by the tower collapses.
• 911Review.org claims that it cascades down through summaries to more detailed reviews, but we cannot find any detailed reviews on the site, with the exception of the page Meyssan,Thierry, the godfather of the Pentagon no-plane hoax.
• 911Review.org claims that it "represents the consensus of a group of 9/11 scientists and researchers", when it features bogus theories that no self-respecting scientist would endorse.
• 911Review.org claims: "we analyze the official reports from Congress like the House Science subcommittee, and a government agencies like FEMA, and cooperating industry groups like ASCE", when in fact 911Review.org is free of any such analysis. Nowhere does it address the official explanations for the collapse of the Twin Towers, for example.
• 911Review.org claims that it stores "thousands of images, and hundreds of video clips, all available to everyone on the Internet", but we can find no evidence of these elusive archives on 911Review.org.
• 911Review.org claims it "has become the number one site for 9/11 research on the Internet today", without producing any evidence to support this claim. It could easily provide access statistics, but does not.
• 911Review.org claims the work of others as its own. For example, its link to a page from Guardian is used to support the idea that 911Review.org "analyzes the official reports". The InsiderTrading page seems to claim credit for research done by Michael Ruppert. Links to archives by others appear to be basis for 911Review.org's claims that it has vast archives of images and videos.