Full details of the BBC complaint from Adrian Mallett

After watching the BBC Conspiracy Files program called '9/11 Ten Years On' Adrian Mallett, a member of the 9/11 truth movement, decided to complain to the BBC. The program distorted or avoided the facts in order to cast members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in the worst possible light.

The BBC then broadcast a further program called '9/11: Conspiracy Road Trip' which can only be described as blatant propaganda in support of the official story. It was full of truly ridiculous 'demonstrated' and 'experimental' evidence heavily stacked to make a group of carefully selected young people, not fooled by the official story, look callous and delusional. The program was so bad that even people who had no idea of any of the problems with the official story thought it was daft.

The BBC is governed by it own charter in which it states it is dedicated to the principles of accuracy and impartiality. Both programs mentioned above, and especially the Road Trip propaganda, ignored the BBC charter. If you care to read through the complaint correspondence that follows you will see that the BBC charter is nothing more than a paper exercise and the BBC itself has no interest in ensuring its producers comply with the rules.

Index of complaint correspondence

Date	Title
09/08/2011	Initial complaint sent by email to the BBC Editorial Standards Committee
25/08/2011	Reply by email from Gareth Brennan of the BBC Audience Services
25/08/2011	Further email to Gareth Brennan of the BBC Audience Services
12/09/2011	Email to Gareth Brennan of BBC Complaints
19/09/2011	Letter from Tanya McKee of BBC Complaints (PDF)
01/10/2011	Email to Tanya McKee of BBC Complaints
07/11/2011	Letter from Gemma McCartan of BBC Complaints (PDF)
02/12/2011	Letter to Gemma McCartan of BBC Complaints
13/12/2011	Email from Patrick Clyde of BBC Complaints
14/12/2011	Email to Patrick Clyde of BBC Complaints
15/01/2012	Further letter to Gemma McCartan of BBC Complaints
11/02/2012	Email from Stuart Webb of BBC Complaints
12/02/2012	Email from Jamie Patterson of BBC Complaints
16/02/2012	Letter to the BBC Editorial Complaints Unit
17/02/2012	No further comments reply from the BBC (PDF)
24/02/2012	Letter from Colin Tregear of the BBC ECU (PDF)
03/04/2012	1200092 911 Conspiracy Road Trip ECU Finding (PDF)
05/04/2012	1200091 The Conspiracy Files 911 Ten Years On ECU Finding (PDF)
23/04/2012	Letter to Lucy Tristam of the BBC Trust Unit
25/04/2012	Email reply from John Hamer of the BBC Trust Unit
29/05/2012	Email from Lucy Tristam of the BBC Trust Unit
30/05/2012	Email to Lucy Tristam of the BBC Trust Unit
13/06/2012	Reply from BBC - Conspiracy Files Mallett (PDF)
13/06/2012	Reply from BBC - Conspiracy Files Annex 2 (PDF)
13/06/2012	Reply from BBC - Conspiracy Road Trip Mallett (PDF)
13/06/2012	Reply from BBC - Conspiracy Road Trip Annex 2 (PDF)
24/06/2012	Letter to Lucy Tristam of the BBC Trust Unit

01/10/2011 - Email to Tanya McKee of BBC Complaints

Dear Ms McKee

Re: CAS-990119-DZS7WB

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my complaint letter of September 12th. I do find it insulting that you didn’t actually read my letter first. It is clear that you did not as I wrote an eight page letter detailing the inaccurate and/or out of date information in the program ‘Conspiracy files: 9/11 - 10 years on’. You referenced it in your letter but then wrote about a completely different program called ‘9/11 conspiracy road trip’. Had you bothered to read my letter you would have quickly realised that your reply to it didn’t make any sense.

You also said that you understood me to be unhappy with the content of the programme as it was ‘biased against Conspiracy Theorists’. I was unhappy about the program because a lot of the facts included in it were just plain wrong. The program clearly had an agenda of trying to cast doubt on observations made by members of the 9/11 Truth movement and was not fair and objective in any way.

By the way it is the Bush administration who are the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. They want you to believe the attack was carried out by Osama Bin Laden and 19 hijackers alone. One of the many problems with that is that the people they name as the hijackers keep turning up alive. You even covered that on the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1559151.stm). I suspect that was when the BBC Chiefs got their knuckles rapped, where told to follow the government line and investigate no further which is the line they have followed ever since.

9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip

Seeing as you chose to write about the ‘9/11 conspiracy road trip’ program instead of the one I made the complaint about then let me raise a complaint against that one as well. In this program the BBC took five individuals who, like millions of others, have questions about various aspects of the official story and ‘present them with the official findings of the investigation’.

Andrew Maxwell sets out the clear intent of the program right from the start. “Unbelievably there are many people who doubt the conclusions of the official investigation”. When you actually look at the official investigations and their conclusions it is easy to see why there are so many people who doubt them so why is this unbelievable? The tone is clear – here are some delusional young people who need fixing. This is backed up by an account written by Emily Church after the program (http://911truthnews.com/911-conspiracy-roadtrip-a-participants-perspective). Maxwell even states that he is on a tough mission to try and change their minds. He does not seem intent on actually looking at the facts with an open mind.

I was intrigued at the start why the five people chosen were all young and, with the exception of Rodney, had no technical background. Of course it was obvious during the program as the producers intention became clear. Had the program included five older, more experienced people who are technically qualified and able to argue the other side it would have become very difficult to stick to the BBC's obvious agenda of backing up the official story and portraying members of the Truth Movement as delusional.

Conspiracy 1: Amateur flying

The first thing the program tries to address is the questions over if it was possible for pilots with virtually no training on small aircraft to fly big airliners into buildings with pin point accuracy. What does the program do? They take the group to a small airfield and get Shazin to pilot and land a Cessna to prove it was possible! At this point I actually thought the program was being satirical before I realised that, incredibly, it was trying to be taken seriously.

To try to give some idea of how daft this bit was here are some of the obvious differences:

9/11 Conspiracy road trip Cessna	Planes flying into WTC 1 and 2 on 9/11
A Cessna is a simple single piston engine aircraft which is why it is used for basic training for new pilots.	The planes were very complex Boeing 767-200 jet airliners requiring hundreds of hours to qualify as pilots.
Shazin flies the plane around at its cruising speed of approx 120kn with the landing being slower at approx 80kn.	The maximum speed of a Boeing 767-200 is 385kn at sea level (This increases to Mach 0.86 at 20,000 feet due to much lower air density). From radar data the planes actually impacted the towers at 510kn and 490kn which is itself impossible for the official story but also shows they were at least flying at maximum speed.
Shazin has an instructor sat by the side of her the whole time.	The terrorists were flying and navigating on their own and under extreme stress.
Shazin carries out very simple manoeuvres and approaches the landing field from the easiest possible direction.	Both planes flew complicated manoeuvres at high speeds before impacting the towers. The large spiral turn carried out by flight 77 before it hit the Pentagon made the air traffic controllers believe it was a fighter jet.
Shazin has a large empty field to land on.	The buildings were not much wider than the planes themselves and the face of each tower was approx the area of an aircraft carrier.
Shazin was very unlikely to get shot down.	If the official story is to be believed then the terrorists were under a very real threat of being intercepted and shot down to add to their stress levels.

In your letter you said ‘I can assure you of our commitment to impartial reporting’. If that was the case then why didn’t you have someone like Captain Russ Wittenberg (of Pilots for 9/11 Truth) to put the other side of the argument?

Captain Wittenberg has over 30,000 hours total flight time on a range of planes including 767s and has actually flown United Airlines 767 N591UA (Aircraft dispatched as United 93) and United Airlines 767 N612UA (Aircraft dispatched as United 175). All airline pilots have to be recertified every 6 months by instructors such as Captain Wittenberg. For the last few years he has been giving these professional, experienced, qualified airline pilots the chance to try and replicate the flight paths for the planes on 9/11 in the simulator. Most take several attempts to hit the buildings while flying at slow speed and numerous attempts to hit it at the planes official maximum speeds let alone the actual speeds they were flying on the day. For the BBC’s Cessna stunt to have been more accurate Shazin would have to try and land the plane after a dive and turn with the throttle fully open, the instructor shouting at her and end up flying thought the posts of a football goal.

Of course the answer to the question ‘why not have someone like Captain Wittenberg to give the other side’ was simple. It didn’t fit in with the picture the program wanted to portray and as such it makes a mockery of the BBC’s commitment to impartial reporting.

Conspiracy 2: Controlled demolition

At least the program takes this claim a bit more seriously than the last one. Yet again Maxwell clearly sets out the BBC’s agenda when he says “I’m hoping a demolition expert will help me make Charlie see reason”.

This time the team talk to a controlled demolition expert. But here again the BBC fails to live up to the impartial reporting commitment by having an Engineer for the 9/11 Truth movement along to add some of the missing facts and validate the information provided. There are currently 1,600 Architects and Engineers signed on the petition on the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website (ae911truth.org) so there are quite a few to choose from. Again, here are a few of the expert’s comments with a brief indication of the other side of the argument. By the way, I have a Civil Engineering Degree so I know what I’m talking about.

9/11 Conspiracy road trip excert	Comment
It would have taken months of preparation to put the explosives in place.	The towers had the longest lift refurbishment in history carried out on them in the year before 9/11. This gave plenty of access to the central core where the main core columns were located. There are no permits for this work recorded with the NY building control organisations. There are also numerous witness accounts of heavy engineering work being carried out on empty floors, power cuts and bomb detection dogs being stood down just prior to 9/11.
They would need a very high velocity charge which would cut through steel.	There is evidence of thermite and nano thermite present in the dust from towers 1, 2 and 7. There are millions of iron microspheres present in the dust to the extent that FEMA actually used them to identify WTC dust. The spheres can only be produced when molten iron droplets cool in air as it is the surface tension which creates the shape. Jet fuel and office fires do not burn hot enough to melt iron but thermite does.
Even if you got the equipment in the building you still need access to the columns.	The people conducting the lift refurbishment had access to the columns. The people carrying out the heavy work on the empty floors had access to everything.
When the tops of the towers tipped slightly the columns had no support and the tops simply had to go straight down. They simply compressed.	According to the latest version of the official story (they are currently on the third version) when towers 1 and 2 collapsed the top sections demolished the bottom sections and then smashed themselves into fragments when they hit the ground. This is ridiculous for so many reasons that I could write pages about it here but in the interests of keeping this short I’ll make just one point. The towers were 3-5 times stronger than they needed to be. Even if what the expert said was correct (and it’s not) each floor would have provided some resistance to the top section as it fell causing small delays. If each floor slowed the top section for half a second the towers would have taken 30-40 seconds to collapse. They fell in 12-14 seconds so that resistance simply wasn’t there. It had to be removed instantly and that can only be done by explosives.

The main smoking gun of 9/11 is WTC building 7. This is a 47 storey sky scraper which also fell on 9/11. It was not hit by a plane and according to NIST collapsed from fire alone. There is a huge amount of information about building 7 available but the program never even mentioned it. I’m not surprised as it is impossible to argue that it was anything other than a controlled demolition. The reason it’s impossible is simple. Building 7 fell for 2.25 seconds at gravitational acceleration (free fall). This is impossible for a gravitational collapse as the building structure resists the load from above and slows the rate of collapse. Even the lead NIST investigator, Shyam Sunder, stated that free fall was impossible at a press conference in August 2008. The problem for NIST was that it is easy to measure the rate of collapse and show that it was in free fall for 2.25 seconds. See this video produced by David Chandler of AE911Truth for a full account of this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDvNS9iMjzA . NIST had to admit this and actually stated the building fell in free fall in their final report issued a few months later. They did not attempt to explain it however, just stated that it fitted with their explanation and refused to answer any questions on it.

I know the building 7 free fall bit is quite technical so here is an easier to understand version. Hold two bricks at shoulder height. Have one brick with nothing underneath it and place a tower of bricks under the other. Drop both bricks at the same time. According to NIST’s explanation for the collapse of tower 7 the brick held over the tower will smash its way through all the other bricks and hit the ground at the same time as the brick dropped in air. You don’t need to be an engineer to know that’s ridiculous but that is exactly the story that the BBC is helping to prop up.

Thermite cutting metal

Here the BBC found a ‘boffin’ to demonstrate how thermite could not have been used to demolish the towers as the amount needed would be huge and impractical. National Geographic attempted to do the same thing on one of their programs. The problem here is how the thermite was set up. Pile it on a steel beam and set light to it and it’s never going to cut anything.

For a start the ‘boffin’ lit the top of the thermite pile so that burning material was never even in contact with the beam until it had burnt down to the bottom. Secondly the thermite was simply piled on top of the beam surface and not contained in any way. The energy produced by the thermite will follow the path of least resistance and in this case that was simply straight up into the air and away from the steel.

One of the guys from AE911Truth conducted an excellent set of tests to show that small quantities of thermite can easily be used to cut beams and destroy bolt heads if it is enclosed in small steel containers. He put the results on the web at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d5iIoCiI8g if you would like to see it. He used less thermite than the ‘boffin’ used and managed to do all the things the BBC’s boffin claimed couldn’t be done.

In Conclusion

I could add similar arguments about the Pentagon and Flight 93 segments but I think I’ve made my point. You say the BBC is committed to impartial reporting but it obviously isn’t where the events of 9/11 are concerned. There are so many problems with the official story and, with the exception of the terrorists who are still alive, none of them has ever been investigated by any program broadcast by the BBC. Mainstream media in other countries such as France and Italy is starting to probe into the problems and ask the questions and it is about time the BBC started to also.

The Government is getting increasingly desperate to keep the official story going and is even now producing teaching packs for UK schools to instil the propaganda as early as possible. It is time the BBC stopped being a cover up tool for those with something to hide and started asking questions. If the official story is correct then there is no problem with doing this and the BBC would then be truly impartial again.

When Tony Blair announced in Parliament that we were going to war in Afghanistan he also stated that there was insufficient evidence to try Bin Laden in a court of law. So there was not enough to try him but there was enough to issue death sentences to thousands of others in two wars? We owe it to all our service personnel and especially those serving in Afghanistan to make sure they are not risking their lives as a direct result of a lie.

Yours Faithfully

Adrian Mallett B.Eng (Hons).

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