Numerous Australians have shared their 9/11 Stories with ABC News Online, but Penny's stood out, for its vivid detail and images of the unimaginable horrors witnessed by so many survivors that day, from all over the world. One of Penny's photos, taken from her hotel room, close to the World Trade Centre complex on the morning of September 11, 2001, shows the aftermath of a man who jumped from the burning skyscrapers :

"There is a dead man about the middle of (this shot of the courtyard below my hotel).

"He's wearing a pink shirt and white pants. I've often wondered if I could somehow track down his family, who would likely know what their husband/father was wearing and whether it would give them any comfort to know exactly what happened to him and that he didn't die alone because I watched and prayed and cried as he died."

The reflections falling across the WTC plaza, in Penny's photo, are from the windows of the World Trade Centre 1 and 2 towers. Within 40 minutes of the photo being taken, both towers will have collapsed, consuming, swallowing up the remains of this unknown man and some 200 more people believed to have leapt or fallen to their deaths.

The fall from the upper floors of the WTC towers would have lasted 9 to 10 seconds.

"Don't Leave The Building. One Of The Trade Towers Just Fell....Please Be Careful"

My first (and hopefully not last) story for ninemsn, on the leaking of Secret Service, US military and emergency services pager TXT messages sent on 9/11, beginning minutes after the first attack on the World Trade Centre. Excerpt :

The whistleblower website Wikileaks last night began to publish some 500,000 pager messages sent on 9/11: many of the messages contain the names and phone numbers of senders and receivers along with intimate details of their relationships.

Wikileaks claimed its release of the pager messages was justified by the historical weight of the information, claiming the half a million texts make up "a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time".

Read The Full Story Here

Will Architect Jan Utzon Be Hounded Into Silence For Questioning The Collapse Of World Trade Centre 7 On 9/11?

By Darryl Mason

Sydney Opera House architect Jan Utzon expresses a healthy professional curiosity, and asks reasonable questions, about the collapse of World Trade Centre 7 in New York City on September 11, 2001 :



Utzon, like hundreds of other architects, engineers, scientists, former military officers and intelligence officials from around the world, stated simply and truthfully that the 'official story' of 9/11 doesn't always make sense, and that three steel framed skyscrapers collapsing from fire damage is an event that has never happened before. He concludes that new investigations are warranted.

The Sydney Morning Herald decides to do some gate-keeping and claims Utzon has "signed up for September 11 conspiracy theories", comparing respected architects who have questions about how three skyscrapers can collapse from fire damage to those who believe The Moon landings were faked.

Herald journalist Sean Nichols tries to dob Utzon in to his employer :

An Opera House spokeswoman said Mr Utzon was ''entitled to his personal views outside of his professional work as architectural adviser to Sydney Opera House''.

The Herald's Rick Feneley uses a report by the US National Institute of Science & Technology (NIST) in an attempt to dismiss all of Utzon's questions about the rapid, total collapse of World Trade Centre 7 :

The National Institute of Standards and Technology spent three years investigating Building 7. It names fire as the culprit. Fire - fuelled by office furnishings, aided and abetted by the thermal expansion of structural elements.

"Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down," said the lead investigator, Shyam Sunder.

Explosives? The institute concludes that the smallest blast capable of crippling the third tower's critical column would have produced a "sound level of 130 to 140 decibels at a distance of half a mile''. No witness reported it.

TV news reports from 9/11 of explosions coming from the vicinity of World Trade Centre 7 before it collapsed. "Keep your eye on that building, it's coming down", "the whole thing's about to blow up" :



Here's a video of an investigator from the National Institute of Science & Technology claiming there was no evidence of molten steel in the ruins of the World Trade Centre buildings. His claim is utterly contradicted by firemen and rescue workers who spent months digging through the wreckage :



The NIST used computer modelling for its theory explaining the collapse of World Trade Centre 7, as all material evidence was removed from the site before the NIST investigations began.


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Just Another Journalist Who Wants 9/11 Victims' Families To Shut Up

By Darryl Mason

President George W. Bush, November 10, 2001 :

“Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11.”

Daily Telegraph associate editor, Tim Blair, marked the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Washington DC and New York City with this remarkably weak and predictably puerile smearing of those who hold doubts about the official Bush White House 9/11 conspiracy theory :

When someone starts in on that stuff, it's time to leave the room. "Truthers", as they are known, hold two mutually-exclusive beliefs: That the Bush administration was run by morons and that it pulled off the greatest conspiracy of all time. Truthers are spectacular idiots.

Here are some of the people utterly incurious journalists like Tim Blair think are "spectacular idiots" for demanding a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, and for those in the Bush administration who failed to protect Americans that day to be held to account :



Ten Australians died in the 9/11 attacks. Some of those victims' friends and relatives have their doubts about the Bush White House official version of events. Considering the abuse dished out by journalists like Tim Blair towards other 9/11 victims' family members, you can understand their reluctance in going public with their doubts.


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It's Just A Plane In The Sky, It's Not A 9/11 Foreshadowing

I had no idea a novel I exhaled in less than a week back in 1996 was now worth so much on Amazon :


I've only been thinking about the novel recently because a friend pointed out something interesting about the cover I haven't thought about in many years.



Yes, that is a bongman smoking himself, but there's the view out the window :



The cover artwork was done by a brilliant Sydney designer named Jeremy. I can't say I ever liked the image of an airliner about to crash into two towers, but I think Jeremy was trying to foreshadow the disaster that befalls the characters in the book, which involves the unexplained collapse of a building.

But I was so blown away by what Jeremy created for the cover I couldn't ask him to change it.

When Truth Is 'Trolling'

I wrote a comment to this post by Tim Blair at a Daily Telegraph blog, about claims Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin linked the Iraq War to 9/11 in a speech to US troops, but it was censored for supposed 'trolling'.

I cited this story from the reputable Jane's, published on September 19, 2001, which shows that Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, were probably the first to publicly draw deep linkages between Saddam's Iraq and the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC :

Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.

When I sent a second comment, asking these questions...

How exactly is trying to clear up where the Iraq Did 9/11 myth came from 'trolling'? Or is Jane's not a reputable enough source for Tim Blair's blog?

...the comment was again censored for 'trolling' :




So what exactly did Blair and his moderator object to in my comments? Was it that Israel is responsible for trying to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, a myth eventually rejected by President Bush? or was it the fact that I mentioned the Jane's story also details how the CIA and Mossad have used car bombs, killing dozens of civilians, as part of their joint 'counter-terrorism' operations?

A year later, in a combined CIA/Mossad operation, a powerful car bomb went off at the entrance to the house of Hizbullah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. Seventy-five people were killed.

Terrorism, ironically, is a fairly effective weapon used by the West to supposedly fight terrorism, in the 'War on Terror'. Is this really such a big secret? Only if you read nothing but the Murdoch media.

Obviously Tim Blair's readers need to cushioned from such uncomfortable truths. Wouldn't want facts to get in the way of the 'Our Terror Bombs Are Freedom Bombs' modern warfare narratives.