911review.org:
The Reality Behind the Myth

The website 911Review.org appeared in September of 2003. Many other September 11th websites link to it, apparently because it appears to fulfill an important function: providing a clearinghouse of information and links to ongoing research on the 9/11/01 attack. However, a careful and critical reading of the site supports a different view of its function. Just as the myth and reality of the 9/11/01 attack diverge, so too do the myth and reality of 911review.org.

We refer here to 911review.org as 9/11 Review, which should not be confused with 911review.com, the site hosting this review. 911review.com spells its name with a hyphen instead of a shash (9-11 Review) to help distinguish itself from 911review.org

This site deconstructs 9/11 Review to disentangle the myth from the reality. It examines the pages of 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review.

This page provides an overview of our analysis of 9/11 Review. 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

• 9/11 Review Preaches to the Choir
• 9/11 Review Filters out Crucial Information
  • 9/11 Review Censors Quality Sites
  • 9/11 Review Marginalizes Top Researchers
  • 9/11 Review Avoids the Strongest Arguments
  • 9/11 Review Buries Central Ideas
• 9/11 Review Discredits Vital Research
  • 9/11 Review is Plagued by Bad Design
  • 9/11 Review Features Ludicrous Theories
  • 9/11 Review is Full of Specious Arguments
  • 9/11 Review Makes Over-Reaching Claims
  • 9/11 Review Mis-Characterizes Key Evidence
• 9/11 Review is Dishonest
• 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review, -- or worse, all skeptics of the official story -- are ideologues who put politics ahead of logic and science.

9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review 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
• LeftGateKeepers.com
• StandDown.net

While pretending that certain sites and researchers do not exist, 9/11 Review marginalizes and misrepresents the work of other sites and researchers through a variety of subtle techniques that can easily be consciously missed. Consider how 9/11 Review handles three researchers, each of whom is an essential part of the history of the 9/11 skeptics movement: Jeff King, Paul Thompson, and Killtown None of the sites of these researchers makes 9/11 Review's list of TrustedWebSites.

• Jeff King
  Jeff King doesn't make 9/11 Review's Sept11Researchers list. The only links to his site on Top Topics pages are on the Sept11Videos page, where it's listed under WebFairy's site and the transparent nonsense about an opening cylinder mounted to the South Tower plane; and on the thoroughly inaccurate TwinTowers page.
• Paul Thompson
  There is a directory to Paul Thompson's site, which is CooperativeResearch.org, but for some reason the page is under 9/11 Review's AnthraxAttacks section. The Anthrax attacks are only one of many topics that Paul Thompson has covered in relation to the 9/11/01 attack. References to Thompson's work elsewhere on the site are few. It appears that 9/11 Review's PriorKnowledge page was written without reviewing Thompson's research.
• Killtown
  Gus Killtown does not make 9/11 Review's Sept11Researchers page, but is acknowledged as a Flight 77 Researcher on the Flight77Sites page. Killtown is the only researcher whose work is linked to in a meaningful way, but since Killtown is an evidence-oriented site, 9/11 Review can contextualize and exploit it.

9/11 Review Avoids the Strongest Arguments

• AirForceStanddown fails to mention standard operating procedure.
• PentagonAttackDamage fails to show or examine the damage to the facade of the Pentagon.
• 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 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review'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.

• 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.
• 9/11 Review'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.
• 9/11 Review 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.

• 9/11 Review has lots of dead links. This seems to be especially true of links that would back up its description of the explosive destruction of the Twin Towers, and the implosion of Building 7. When 9/11 Review went online in September of 2003, it had dozens of stillborn links to nerdcities.com/guardian -- a site that had disappeared the previous May. The links remain dead in this January 2004 mirror, even though the guardian site by then reappeared elsewhere.
• 9/11 Review lacks introductory material. Its pages have no titles other than the file name, such as SpringmanInterview, and jump into streams of reportage or lists of points with no context.
• 9/11 Review links to irrelevant pages. It will take you to places you didn't ask to go. It will challenge you to find the worthwhile pages.

• 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. 9/11 Review fails to mention the evidence that does support the claim: aerial photographs of Ground Zero showing the extent of the Towers' heavy fallout.
• 9/11 Review claims (in several places) that the damage to the Pentagon could only be caused by a warhead, when demolition charges could have produced the same result.
• 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 claims 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. Both assertions are unfounded.
• 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.

9/11 Review 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, 9/11 Review 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, when in fact the few pieces of debris photographed appear to have been planted. This is important evidence of a frame-up, and 9/11 Review completely avoids it, except for a meaninglessly vague reference on the PentagonAttackDebris page.
• 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.

9/11 Review 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.

• 9/11 Review 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.
• 9/11 Review 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. Meyssan's work was current in early 2002, but other researchers, such as Eastman, Strahl, Russell, and Stanley, have since taken the Pentagon analysis much further. Their research is not even mentioned by 9/11 Review.
• 9/11 Review 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.
• 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review is free of any such analysis. Nowhere does it address the official explanations for the collapse of the Twin Towers, for example.
• 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review.
• 9/11 Review 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.
• 9/11 Review claims the work of others as its own. For example, its link to a page from Guardian is used to support the idea that 9/11 Review 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 9/11 Review's claims that it has vast archives of images and videos.

9/11 Review has the potential to damage the cause of exposing the 9/11/01 deception by steering people away from quality sites, and contextualizing the work of serious researchers as conclusion-driven nonsense. Whether by design or incompetence, 9/11 Review functions as a destructive meme, setting back the campaign to educate the public about the reality of 9/11/01.