On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Real Science Radio hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney take on one of the most persistent and controversial questions surrounding that day:
Was 9/11 an inside job?
Rather than beginning with a predetermined answer, Fred and Doug attempt to separate several very different claims: whether the United States government failed to prevent the attacks, whether officials had warnings they failed to act upon, and the much larger allegation that people inside the government deliberately planned, facilitated or knowingly allowed the attacks to happen.
The program
00:00:00 Opening thoughts on conspiracy claims and intelligence design
00:00:41 Introduction to the 9/11 anniversary discussion
00:01:15 KSM trial delays and questions about justice
00:06:05 Watching the towers fall live on television
00:08:40 Was 9/11 failure, negligence, or something more
00:11:46 Why people are suspicious and how evidence should be weighed
00:14:05 Applying scientific standards to 9/11 evidence
00:17:11 NIST steel analysis and the limits of the evidence
00:19:36 Why distrust of government fuels conspiracy thinking
00:21:38 Broader cultural suspicions from evolution to art and media
SPEAKER 04 :
Many Americans, especially common sense, Christian, Bible-believing Americans, assume that the powers that be have carried off one of the greatest conspiracies in all of human history.
SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 04 :
And I’m Doug McBurney. Fred, today is the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11th, and we’re going to take a look today at what we know, what we don’t know, what’s changed for the better, for the worse, and whether or not there’s compelling evidence… that the attacks were either allowed or perpetrated by elements within the American government. In other words, Fred, was 9-11 an inside job?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, apparently this Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, better known as KSM, his trial is finally scheduled to begin, Doug, in June of 2028. This is 27 years after 9-11. You know, nothing says swift American justice quite like taking longer to schedule a trial than it took us to build the World Trade Center.
SPEAKER 1 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
I guess at this rate, the conspiracy may be that the government is trying to make sure everybody involved dies of old age before somebody renders a verdict on this thing.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s just unbelievable, Fred. Wow. That’s 27 years. That’s longer than it took us to lose the war in Afghanistan.
SPEAKER 02 :
So investigations were undertaken by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, everybody knows them as FEMA, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also called NIST. So FEMA’s report was published in 2002, followed by a NIST report in 2005. Now, some have seized on the facts that FEMA occasionally slaughters American citizens and that the NIST investigation was funded by the federal government. And since, you know, according to them, the government itself was involved, either by wiring the buildings with demolition explosives or managing the attackers or some even more sophisticated and diabolical things, we’ll hopefully have time to get to in the show later, Doug. Or were at the very least aware that the attacks were coming. So there has, in fact, never been a trustworthy investigation according to those who think 9-11 was an inside job. Right, right.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, let’s just, you know, since everybody, Fred, tends to think about where they were the moment they heard, it’s like my parents used to talk about where were you when they shot Kennedy, you know, and for us, it’s where were you on September 11th. As I recall, I got a call from my mom around 7.30 in the morning, and it was just after the second plane had hit, because we have to remember, Fred, People weren’t really aware it was an attack until that second plane, and then it was really obvious, and so my mom called me, and I remember we had just had a baby. Our oldest daughter was only a year old, and my wife and I, we’d been up late, and I remember wiping the sleep out of my eyes, and she told me, turn on the TV, we’re under attack, and… I turned it on and asked her what was going on, and I just kind of slowly started to understand what was happening. How did you find out, Fred?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you know, I was thinking back on that, and I was getting up out of bed. I think I was even laying in bed, and Sandy had this little TV on that we had in our bedroom at the time. It’s no longer there, but, you know, I think Ryan was four years old, and I think we were getting ready to, or at least Sandy was going to take him to preschool, so he’s in there, I think, watching cartoons. And then Sandy turned the channel, I think, because she heard about what was going on. And I just started watching that and watching that first building burn. And I do remember thinking, well, this has got to be a terrorist attack. But you don’t know for sure because their reports are like, well, it could have been a small plane. Even if it’s a small plane, how does a small plane crash into a big building like that? Yeah. The odds are really low that somebody maybe passed out and just flew into it. So I’m thinking terrorist attack. And then you see that second one. I’m like, oh, my goodness. And the other thing I remember about that day is going into work. And it was just so eerie because there was no planes except for occasional fighter jets screaming through the air.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, right. I forgot about that. That was really true.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. So it was an interesting time for sure.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I recall at some point, and I can’t recall exactly when, but I was on the phone with Bob Enyar, and he was telling me that he was live on the air, AM 1360, up in Johnstown, where his show was at that time. And I was on the phone with him, and it seems to me at the moment, Fred, in my mind that he did not have a television. I can’t swear to that, but it seems to me that he was on the radio and he was not watching television. And I was. I was watching television. And I was watching the live feed of the Towers on the Today Show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. And Bob was on the air with Don Wiedemann, as a matter of fact. And he called me at the top of an hour commercial break because it was right before the stroke of 8 a.m. mountain time when the first tower started to collapse. And I remember holding the phone and saying, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, Bob. And I don’t say, oh, my God, lightly, by the way. And I knew that Bob was always offended by people who use that phrase casually. But as I watched that happening, it makes you think about God, I’ll tell you that, because it was shocking. And so I cried out for real. And Bob was, I remember him like, what’s happening? I said, the towers are collapsing. The tower is collapsing. The tower is collapsing. Anyway, and then Bob went on the air. And we’ll probably get to some of that here in a little bit with some of what Bob said on the air that day while the events were happening.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. So, I mean, did Bob already know about it, the crash? Oh, yes. The second plane? And then it’s okay. Oh, yes. So he didn’t find out from you.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, no, no. And in fact, it’s kind of coming back to me now, Fred, and I probably don’t remember it all perfectly, but I remember… He and Wiedemann had said before the top of the hour break. By the way, folks, if you’re on the radio, the top of the hour break comes at 2830. 5830, sorry. Bottom of the hour, 2830. Top of the hour, 5830, at least back then. And so there’s about a minute and a half until what would have been 10 a.m. Eastern. 958, I believe, the first hour fell. So anyway, it was during that top of the hour break. And they were aware of what was going on, but it literally had just happened. And if I remember, Bob wanted to know, are you watching television? Can you see what’s happening? Because Don Wiedemann’s studio up at AM 1360 in Johnstown, Colorado, look it up on a map. It was rather Spartan. I don’t think they had maybe a hot plate, but no TV anymore. And so Bob asked me, were you watching television? And I was, and that’s what I recall. And then I never went to work that day. You went to work, huh? Yeah, actually went to work. Yeah. Well, okay, well, we’re going to look at a few different questions today, Fred. First, did the government simply fail to prevent 9-11? Okay. Second, did the government or the CIA or the FBI or Dick Cheney or the Israelis or USAID orchestrate, facilitate, or knowingly allow the attacks? And third… Was the response at the time and since, was that good, bad? How do we assess that overall?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and one thing we should be clear about as we go, there are really two very different propositions here. One is that the government had warnings, made serious mistakes, and failed to stop the attack. Now, there’s plenty of evidence worth examining, Doug, on that question. The much, much bigger claim is that officials inside the government or some other nefarious group planned or deliberately allowed the attacks. So the point is, evidence of incompetence or prior warnings is not by itself evidence of that second larger conspiracy claim.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I’m glad you’re clear about that, Fred, because that’s a serious charge. Serious charge. But as to the first part, incompetence… The fact that the president, who was responsible for protecting us, I remember he was caught unawares. He was in a public school burnishing his kinder, gentler political persona and pretending with the kids that he knew how to read, sitting there in front of a children’s classroom in a government school. I mean, that proves to me the answer to the first question, evidence of incompetence.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. So, I mean, there’s no doubt, Doug, that the watchers on the wall, so to speak, you know, they were at least distracted, right? You know, and perhaps a case could be made that they were negligent. And not just Bush, but if you go back to Bill Clinton, I mean, remember he admitted… that he could have killed bin Laden. I remember that story was around a lot, and this was back in 1998, that they had a chance to kill bin Laden, because everybody knew then he was this really bad terrorist. He was all over the news for quite a bit of time, up to 9-11. So the second claim, the claim that 9-11 was deliberately engineered by people inside the American government… Doug, has that been established by credible evidence?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, so let’s try to take a look as best we can, Fred. But right up front, something everyone should admit at the beginning of this discussion is that when you’re talking about evidence in the 9-11 attacks, none of us actually have access to the firsthand evidence that was present at the time. And we all have to take other people’s word for most of what we hear. I mean, except for what we saw and experienced on that day, which we just proved, Fred, was very little. Except for that, I mean, I’m not going to pretend that I have more evidence than that that I can guarantee. I’m not going to claim that the evidence I cite is any more credible… than any evidence anybody else cites. And so arguments about evidence we can’t confirm, it just needs to all have that caveat. But, you know, we could start with what makes people suspicious, Fred, because I think that’s a more interesting topic.
SPEAKER 02 :
It really struck home to me when you said that we have to take people’s word for a lot of what we hear. That reminds me of the whole Jon Bonnet Ramsey case. And so one time that I can think of where I disagreed with Bob on something, I mean, there were other things I disagreed with Bob on that I was wrong about. He proved me wrong. But this was one that, you know, we talked about several times and I just said, you know, I just, I didn’t buy your whole theory on the John Bonet Ramsey. I didn’t think it was that compelling. Yeah. And, you know, maybe we’ll get to that later in the show, Doug, because it kind of plays into this whole thing about taking people’s word for what we hear, because there’s something said in that John Bonnet Ramsey case that I think would have made everybody think it had to be, no pun intended, an inside job. So I’m real sensitive to, you know, taking the word of other people because I’ve been burned by that. We were all burned by that on the John Bonnet Ramsey case. Yeah. I’ll make sure we bring that up later in the show. So I guess this is kind of a tease.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, there you go.
SPEAKER 02 :
So we don’t get too derailed. That’s right. And I did want to bring something else up. So one of my favorite shows is the one we did with the Harvard scientist, Dr. Rob Stadler. Oh, yeah. He’s got a PhD in medical engineering from Harvard, MIT. the Division of Health Sciences and Technology. And he developed six criteria for what he calls high-confidence science, and I hope that we can apply that here. And it’s useful because we’re not asking people to blindly trust the government. I mean, none of us should do that. What we’re asking, what I want to ask Doug… as a co-host of Real Science Radio, how strong is the evidence? And so his criteria for good evidence in real science, he says our confidence should be greater when the science is, one, repeatable, two, directly measurable with accurate results, three, prospective and interventional rather than retrospective and observational… Four, careful to avoid bias. Five, careful to avoid assumptions. And six, sober in judging the results. And saying it another way, Doug, is not overstating the confidence or scope of what the evidence shows. Try to be aware of that eerie music playing in the background of that video that’s making a case for whatever point they’re trying to push. Because there’s ways… to draw you in.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. Because the truth is 9-11 presents limitations under, I think, every single one of those criteria. And I’m not talking about minor limitations. Major league limitations on every single one of those. You can’t repeat 9-11. You can’t rebuild the World Trade Center. You can’t fly airplanes into it under controlled conditions and see what happens. Everyone who’s investigated necessarily had to work backward from a historical event.
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly, Doug. And, you know, that doesn’t mean that their conclusions are wrong necessarily. It means we should recognize the limitations of the evidence and be careful about how much certainty we attach to such a reconstruction as, you know, like they did with that investigation. And here’s what we should all consider. And it’s an important part that the standard cuts both ways. For example, if the NIST computer models depend on assumptions, we should identify and examine those assumptions. But if somebody says that Building 7 was brought down with, for example, thermite, their theory doesn’t get a free pass. I’d like to ask, for example, where’s the directly measurable evidence? What assumptions are they making? And are they claiming more than their evidence demonstrates?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. And did you say thermite?
SPEAKER 02 :
Thermite.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so Fred, well, we’ll get to this. I mean, you’re so far behind thinking, still thinking thermite. I mean, please. Anyway, but seriously, the I don’t believe the government’s explanation, that isn’t evidence for controlled demolition. You still have to provide evidence for a controlled demolition. And by the way, you don’t have the ability to go scrape Building 7 for actual evidence. So anyway, just how difficult this argument can get if we don’t admit up front that we’re all making some pretty major league assumptions.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And so for the rest of the show, though, I’d like to keep Dr. Stadler’s six criteria in the back of our minds. And we don’t have to decide whether we trust the government or distrust the government. Let’s ask how much confidence the evidence itself deserves. I mean, where on the confidence scale from zero to 100 do we go? So… Doug, before I ask your opinion of why do people suspect it’s an inside job, you mentioned there’s only so much material we have that we can scrape from this thing. And so that brings us to the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 04 :
What? I thought we were going to start talking about why people don’t trust the government. Fred, we can’t delay that topic. People are on the edge of their seat.
SPEAKER 02 :
I have a feeling they might be just on the edge of their seat for the interesting fact of the week. Okay. Well, this week I’m ready. Okay. Here we go. Here is the interesting fact of the week. How many pieces of the World Trade Center structural steel did NIST actually analyze as part of its investigation? And I’ll give you a multiple choice because I can’t expect you just to ring out.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, can I just say I think it’s a surprisingly high number.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s my gut.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. So do you want a multiple choice or do you want to just take a wild guess? No, no. Give me the multiple choice. I’ll take all the help I can get. So A, 23, B, 76, C, 236, D, 1,106, and E, 5,222. I’d go with the 5,000. It was C, 236. Okay, 200. So NIST says this. This investigation also involved roughly 200 technical experts, more than 1,000 interviews and review of about 7,000 video segments and 7,000 photographs. And, you know, I find that especially useful after considering Rob Stadler’s criteria because you can say, so they didn’t have all the physical evidence, but they didn’t have zero physical evidence either.
SPEAKER 04 :
So it gets back to your… Ah, and Fred, this is why, this is evidence that I don’t have an engineering degree. The engineers… probably recognized that they could take elements of evidence from various parts maybe that match video or pictures and that they didn’t need to analyze all 50 trillion pieces of the of the towers which i mean how many pieces were there it’s it’s unimaginable but they didn’t have 36 is what they had that they actually ended up analyzing yeah
SPEAKER 02 :
And I want to get back to the fact that there was 200 technical experts involved in this, plus over 1,000 interviews and consultants. We’re going to return to that later in the show. Okay. I think it’s important. So, Doug, why do people suspect it was an inside job?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, Fred, it’s because people don’t trust the government, right? Have you noticed that? People don’t trust the government, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, because it gets back to the whole flat earth thing, right? That’s why a lot of Christians not into the flat earth. They just don’t trust the government.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s exactly. That’s a great example, Fred. And we can actually start with, speaking of earth, I mean, we can start with the Big Bang, evolution, and atheism. Right? And then maybe we could get to the JFK assassination and the moonshot and COVID and the 2020 election results and Russiagate. I mean, but let’s start with evolution, Fred. Many Americans, especially common sense, Christian, Bible-believing Americans, assume that the powers that be have carried off one of the greatest conspiracies in all of human history. That of converting a nation that was founded on biblical morals and a biblical understanding of history and behavior, converting it into an atheistic society that believes some of the biggest lies ever told, Fred. And they think, well, if they pulled that big lie off, what else could they be lying about? Kennedy? The moon? 9-11, I mean, everything. I mean, if they pulled off godless evolution in broad daylight in front of God and everybody, with people who had been to college for crying out loud, we just can’t put anything past these people. So maybe they’re lying about everything big, Fred. Just like with Jackson Pollock and rap music. Jackson Pollock at rap music. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Fred. Uh-huh. Oh, so declassified CIA documents show that CIA had an outfit, the CIA, sorry, the CIA had this outfit called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is a real thing, Fred. I’m not making this up.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll link to the CIA.
SPEAKER 04 :
The CIA had the Congress for Cultural Freedom. I’ll link to the actual government documents. And they promoted modern art like Jackson Pollock starting in the 1950s. And now ostensibly they were promoting it to counter the Soviet Union’s cultural psychological operation around realism. And this was all during the Cold War, Fred, when people made vast amounts of money and livings and retirements, creating psychological battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. So somehow some genius in the government thinks promoting abstract modern art like that of Jackson Pollock. And we’ll link to some of that if you want to see what that looks like. And a lot of common sense Americans, again, Fred, they looked at this and they suspected… that this whole operation… First of all, they were like, nobody could possibly actually like this art. This is garbage. The guy literally threw paint on a piece of canvas. You’re telling me this is art? And so people were suspicious. Like, how does this happen? Well, it turns out Jackson Pollock probably never would have sold a painting for more than 50 bucks at a yard sale if the CIA hadn’t invested in a genuine operation to promote… this horrible, what they called abstract art, and they claim they were doing it against the Soviets. But when you look at it, Fred, just as a Christian person with Christian sensibilities, you’ve got to suspect that maybe this whole operation was actually counterintelligence by the Soviets. Maybe they took over the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, and they were actually implementing their plot to degrade our sense of… Things that are lovely, things that are beautiful, things that are true. And so instead, we’re kind of wondering, how is it that everyone in America who’s culturally elite and smart and all the people I’m supposed to want to be like, how come they tell me I need to like this talentless, ugly, horrible, stupid art? It was just all very suspicious.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I guess I’m starting to see how you would tie this to rap music. Talentless, stupid, ugly art.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. I thought maybe you were a big rap fan, Fred. I didn’t want to offend.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, no. Trust me. You’re not offending me. I’m the typical of my generation that rap music is like it’s not music. Okay. It’s just saying words and there’s something going on in the background. Yes. But… But, you know, Doug, I mean, it’s a really good point that, you know, we’ve done these homeschool conferences and then just talking to some Christians, great people, but they have such a distrust of government and distaste that they just buy into some of these just impossible conspiracy theories like flat earth and, you know, faking the moon landing and all these things.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
And, you know, and we’ll talk a little bit more about… why we want Christians to really think about what they’re doing and how it relates to morality in the Bible when you’re making claims like that, because you’re making claims against other Christians.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s one of the things with science. All the major sciences were founded by Bible-believing Christians, and so that’s accepted by all the scientists of the world except things like gravity and just basic physics, all of those things that Christians discovered. Is that a conspiracy? Christians are actually at the forefront of that stuff. So just because the government has done some really bad things and there’s been the pushing of this fairy tale of evolution and, like you said, the Big Bang, that doesn’t mean that you just, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater on things that are actually true. Right, right. What a real science.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, and so it’s like something that Bob pointed out on a show. Right toward the end of his life was a survey of medical doctors. These are doctors who actually do medicine and help sick people. And the majority of them believed in God and creation. They didn’t believe in evolution. And that was shocking to me because I’ve been told everybody believes in evolution except you, you nut job, wacko.
SPEAKER 02 :
you know christian tinfoil hat guy believes in a magic spaghetti monster in the sky who created everything and but a lot of that fred and a lot of it was plain deception because they have this poll and what was the uh the pew i think pew institute that 98 point something scientists believe in evolution well guess what all they did was pull the uh national academy of sciences that produce science magazine well those are evolutionists oh That’s like going to San Francisco and taking a poll. Do you believe in gay marriage? Or do you think homosexuality is okay? But you’re only polling San Francisco? Yeah. And say you’re polling downtown, the back alleys of San Francisco. It’s going to be 98.6% support that.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
It was so deceptive.
SPEAKER 04 :
And Fred, deceptions like that… They didn’t happen by happenstance, it turns out. That’s called a conspiracy, Fred. When someone purposely alters, or I shouldn’t say alters, when someone purposely misrepresents the data over and over and over, and in fact, Fred even calculates the collection of the data so that it’ll be skewed and then presents it as real, That is a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies. It’s like rap music, Fred. I mean… President Trump, he just defunded another actual intelligent asset last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, popularly known as USAID. I’m sure you remember after Doge exposed all the profligate spending on vast foreign aid boondoggles and NGO media campaigns that were promoting… grossly leftist propaganda. I remember hearing all about it, Fred, and thinking, I was wondering, did we actually win the Cold War or did we lose? Did the Russians pretend to lose because they had already taken over our government? Look what we’ve been funding over at USAID. And Fred, a lot of other common sense Christian people, I mean, they’re wondering the same thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent design and DNA. Scholars can’t explain it all the way. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune into Real Science Radio.
