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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

12/09/2011 - Email to Gareth Brennan of BBC Complaints

Dear Gareth

I recently sent you a complaint about the BBC showing an out of date edition of the Conspiracy Files about the collapse of WTC building 7 which was clearly intended to cast doubt and ridicule on those questioning the official story of the events of 911. (Your ref – case number CAS-927900-GS71RV)

Last week the BBC had done it again. The Conspiracy Files program ‘9/11 ten years on’ was clearly intended as blatant propaganda against members of the truth movement. It is high time the BBC started looking into some of the numerous problems with the official story using basic scientific facts which cast doubt on the official Bush Administration conspiracy theory put out from day one. The problems with the official story are well documented on various websites with a few listed here:

ae911truth.org - Over 1,500 Architects and Engineers who state the official version of the building collapses just cannot be correct.

scientistsfor911truth.org - A group of scientific professionals who are calling for new, independent, and scientific investigations of the events of 9/11.

firefightersfor911truth.org - A group of Fire-fighters deeply troubled by the “official story,” and the manner in which it was investigated.

pilotsfor911truth.org - An organization of aviation professionals and pilots who are committed to seeking the truth surrounding the events of the 11th of September 2001.

The Conspiracy Theory program on Building 7 and the one from last week have been blatant attempts to discredit and ridicule those who are simply seeking the truth. Rather than just provide this as an opinion I am so disgusted with the latest program that I have gone through it in some detail highlighting the areas in which it is biased, incorrect or misleading due to the avoidance of strong evidence. Hopefully someone at the BBC will start ensuring that the program makers get their facts straight and look at all the facts.

Times are given from the program for reference.

The Conspiracy Files 911 – ten years on

00:20 “Look closer through the smoke and horrors say the conspiracy theories and you’ll find that not everything is as it first appeared”.

Ironically the clip shown while this statement is being made demonstrates one of the biggest issues with the final NIST theory of how the towers collapsed. By the way NIST’s current official theory is their third official theory now that their last official theory of pancake collapse has been officially abandoned. NIST’s third official theory proposes that the top sections of towers 1 and 2 started to fall at the points of impact and crushed the rest of the buildings on the way down through the path of most resistance until they hit the ground where they were pulverised by their own momentum. This theory is ridiculous, defies the laws of physics and directly contradicts what is clearly happening in the clip. The clip shows the top section of tower 1 start to descend. The mast on the top clearly indicates the rate of descent but the clip also shows the part of the building below the crash site is static and intact. The mast descends through half the height of the top section before dust obscures the bottom part of the building indicating that half the top section has already been destroyed before any of the bottom section sustains damage. Add to this the fact that the building rapidly increases in strength closer to the ground and it becomes clear how farcical NIST’s theory is.

00:50 “If a large passenger jet crashed into the pentagon why was the hole in the exterior wall apparently so small?”

Pictures taken of the pentagon just after the crash but before the segment of the building collapsed clearly show the hole approximately 5m wide with the windows on either side it still intact. A jet measuring 38m wide and 13.5m high is supposed to have gone into that hole. Whether the plane folded up and fitted through the hole or not the evidence of the size of the hole is clear (and I’ve included the photo of the initial impact hole below) so why was the word ‘apparently’ used in the sentence. There was even a picture shown in the background which demonstrated how small the hole was. Again, the narration contradicted the images.

If this part of the program was supposed to list the claims made by the truth movement then the sentence would have been constructed along the lines of “How did a large passenger jet manage to fit into a hole only 5m across and leave the windows either side and above intact?” Clearly the sentence is constructed to cast doubt on the claim right from the start and is therefore biased. Incidentally other questions to add to this one could include “Why can none of the footage from the 83 cameras covering the building be shown to discredit the conspiracy theories” or “How did the plane manage to hit the building flying straight and level just above the ground when the flight data recorder places the aircraft 300m above the building and in a dive a few seconds prior to the time of impact?”.

01:51 “So why do so many people doubt what the American government tells them about 911”.

Here is a simple test for you. Drop a brick in air and it will fall at gravitational acceleration which is called ‘free fall’. Drop a brick in water and it will not fall as fast because some of its energy has to be used to move the water in front of it out of the way as it descends. According to NIST (who conducted the investigations into the collapses and which is a part of the American government) if a brick is dropped over a pile of other bricks it will smash its way through them and hit the floor at the same time as it would have if it had been dropped in air. If you do not believe that is possible then you also doubt the official Bush administration version of events simply because it is not physically possible. Unfortunately this program looked at very few of the facts and instead simply tried to discredit anyone asking questioning the official conspiracy theory (which is what it is).

02:40 “This is all that remains of Americas biggest crime scene”.

This statement is largely correct but the program does not ask why. When an aircraft crashes in the ocean extensive efforts are made to recover the debris and painstakingly reconstruct the aircraft to try to discover what happened. Particularly investigators look to see if there is any evidence which could help identify the cause or perpetrators involved. Such investigations follow clearly laid down procedures and very little expense is spared. For the biggest terrorist attack in US history the evidence was removed to China and destroyed as quickly as possible. The investigation into building 7 was given funding of 15 million dollars while the investigation into Clinton’s oval office blow job received twice that amount.

Why were standard investigation procedures not followed? Why was evidence not preserved but rather was shipped off to China as quick as possible and destroyed? Why did the film not ask these or any other of the host of unanswered questions?

03:00 “The official account of what happened on that day is unequivocal”

Actually it is full of errors, omissions and misdirection. The explanations of why the twin towers collapsed have gone through three versions now with each version contradicting the previous ones. For example the pancake collapse theory relied on the failure of the connections between the floor beams and the supporting columns. When the pancake theory was abandoned a new theory was proposed in which the sag of the floor beams pulled the exterior columns in which in turn lead to their buckling and subsequent building collapse. This new theory relies on the same beam to column connections previously declared weak to be strong enough to resist forces that they were never designed for. Incidentally NIST commissioned tests to demonstrate the sag of the beams at fire temperatures but despite high temperatures, less fire resistance and heavier loading the tests resulted in only a 3 inch sag instead of the 42 inches required by NISTs theory. The lack of sag meant that the beams would actually had the effect of bracing the external walls which is in direct conflict with NISTs theory of collapse. In order to try and rescue their flawed theory NIST removed all the floors and beams from their computer model and then applied large external loads to the perimeter walls for no other apparent reason other than to get the model to provide the results they wanted.

The official explanation of why no planes were intercepted on the day has also completely changed three times over the last decade with the official version documented by the 911 commission directly contradicted by the subsequent version. When I checked the word ‘unequivocal’ in a dictionary it means ‘certain’. Which of the versions of the story was the producer certain of then?

03:10 “Asama Bin Laden’s 19 young hijackers ... calmly walked through airport security and hijacked four planes”.

Asama Bin Laden was clearly shown on the FBI’s website along with a list of atrocities he was wanted for. The 911 attacks were never added to that list. When the FBI director was asked why he stated that there was insufficient evidence to link Bin Laden to 911. Tony Blair even said that there was not enough evidence to try Bin Laden in a court of war but then decided there was sufficient to go to war. The names and pictures of the 19 hijackers were also placed on the FBU website. At least 6 of the people named and pictured have been found alive and well and three of these are Saudi Airline pilots who were unhappy about having their mug shots on the FBU site. They received official apologies from the US state department but the FBU website has still not been updated. Surely the primary concern in any crime is to find out correctly who carried it out before any punishment is doled out.

07:30 Lack of interception of the aircraft

The procedures for the interception of hijacked aircraft changed just before 911. Prior to that there were two procedures for depending on if the requirement was for speed or a stealthy approach. One procedure allows the military to immediately launch aircraft while the second required them to get permission from the defence department before any aircraft could be launched. Just before 911 the first procedure was revoked which meant that no aircraft could be launched without very high level clearance. This is like having to ring Boris Johnson before any London Fire Appliance can be mobilised to a fire. On the day of 911 the people responsible for providing the permission to get aircraft in the air could not be contacted which significantly helped to delay the intercepting aircraft. A few days after 911 the first procedure was reinstated. Again this kind of detail is very easily checked out but was not included in the program.

10:00 Loose Change interview

Loose Change has done a great deal to bring the questions about the official version of the events of 911 to the notice of the general public. Instead of looking at their evidence in detail the program did its best to portray the Loose Change film producers as a bunch of ‘typical conspiracy theorists’. It was clearly an attempt to discredit the work they have done on their “bargain basement computers”. The program also tried to imply that the main motive behind the Loose Change film is for the commercial gain of the creators instead of perhaps being a group of concerned citizens who simply want to ask questions that no one behind the official story wants to answer.

12:51 “Reports of loud bangs and the sudden collapse of the buildings are taken as proof of explosives”

There is tons of evidence concerning the collapse of the towers. Rather than repeat it here simply watch the film “Blueprint for truth” by Architects and Engineers for 911 truth (ae911truth.org). This goes into details to show that the buildings demonstrated numerous similarities with a controlled demolition but almost none with a gravitational collapse. For example rapid onset of collapse, sounds of explosions at ground floor a second before the building's destruction, symmetrical "structural failure" through the path of greatest resistance at free-fall acceleration, it imploded, collapsed completely, and landed in its own footprint, created a massive volume of expanding pyroclastic-like clouds and there was foreknowledge of the "collapse" by the media.

I notice that the 1,500+ qualified, practising Architects and Engineers who question the official explanation for the collapses are not mentioned in this film at all. But then neither are the professional pilots, scientists, academics, military officers or any of the others.

14:00 Twin towers collapse

This section of the program dealt with the NIST theory of why the twin towers collapsed. The background film for this part actually showed the ‘pancake’ collapse which has long since been abandoned by NIST while the narrator described NISTs latest theory. The main reason for NIST abandoning the pancake theory was that had the building collapsed in this manner there would have been two piles of floors at the bottom of largely intact central cores. In fact most of the building was pulverised to dust so NIST came up with a new theory for the initiation of collapse but never explained anything past that. Incidentally the reason NIST never found any evidence for explosives was because they never even checked for them despite this being a clear requirement under the fire investigation standards.

The latest sagging floor theory has never been backed up with any experimental evidence and relies totally on a computer analysis. The computer analysis is a joke as NIST had to completely remove all the floors and add imaginary external loads to the perimeter walls to get the results they wanted. It is also worth noting that the NIST report only covered the initiation of collapse and had no explanation whatsoever to explain any events past that point despite their brief clearly stating that they should.

Just for the sake of argument let us assume that any one of the many official gravitational versions of the collapse is correct. The structures below the crash sites were designed to support the buildings above and were very strong. The only energy available to destroy each floor was the initial potential energy of the top sections. The effect of using some of the potential energy to do the work of pulverising each floor would be to slow the rate of decent of the top sections in a similar way to a brick dropped in water being slowed by the water in front of it. If each floor caused a delay of just half a second in the rate of descent then the collapse times would have been approximately 30-40 seconds rather than the near free fall times of 12-14 seconds actually taken for the complete collapses.

16:30 Professor Abulhassan Astaneh

This section of the program started with the familiar criticism of members of the truth movement but that was clearly the producers intention right from the start. Professor Astaneh blames the collapses on the thin outer walls so let us assume that he is correct for a moment. The twin towers consisted of a very strong central core with an outer container of walls and floors slung between. If the outer walls had failed then the top sections would have toppled off to one side rather than falling straight through the paths of maximum resistance. In fact the top of tower 2 does initially start to rotate off to one side but then the rotation abruptly stops and the top drops vertically. The only way for this to have happened is for the fulcrum of rotation to be removed at a rate faster than the top section could descend. This is a problem as it is supposed to be the mass of the top section falling which destroyed the bottom part of the building.

18:00 “But if there was a government conspiracy, what could possibly be the motive?”

The twin towers were losing tenants and becoming financially unviable. The towers were full of asbestos and removing it was going to cost a fortune. The towers were very well insured and the insurance money is nicely financing the replacement modern buildings. The team investigating the 2.3 trillion dollars unaccounted for by the US military was located in the exact section of the pentagon which was destroyed. Building 7 contained the records of many of the investigations into major fraud cases such as Enron. The attacks created enough support for the Bush administration to enable them to pass laws directly limiting civil liberties such as the patriot act. The subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with the rebuild contracts and oil interests made a lot of people very rich. The Bush administration was flagging badly in the polls prior to 911, afterwards they sailed through to a second term. This is just a selection of the possible motives behind 911.

20:00 Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon

The program states that the FBI has released some footage of the attack on the pentagon. There are 83 cameras on the pentagon including one which was looking directly down the flight path taken by flight 77. If they released a few of these they could directly rebut the conspiracy theories but they refuse to do so as it would ‘endanger national security’. The aircraft identity and what it did that day is stated in the official version so how could it possibly endanger national security to release confirmation pictures of it. Of course the program did not ask any of these questions.

Another issue with the pentagon strike is that the building is surrounded by ground to air missiles and is located in the most restricted airspace on the planet. No aircraft without a military transponder is allowed in the area and any unidentified aircraft within 3 miles is shot down. If the official story was correct then flight 77 not only lacked a military transponder but also had its civilian one switched off and yet still managed to fly in a circle in the restricted airspace before hitting the building. How is that possible when at that time the US was effectively under attack and on high alert?

24:00 Analysis of the pentagon strike

The analysis of the pentagon strike as displayed at 23:33 clearly shows the wings and engines striking the sides of the building either side of the 5m entry hole and knocking down columns. The problem with this is that the photos taken minutes after impact and shown earlier in the program indicate no damage to the walls and even show the windows still intact. This is not questioned in the program.

31:00 Professor Niels Harrit

Building 7 is the focus of a lot of analysis by highly qualified members of the truth movement mainly because the official explanation of the collapse of this building is not only ridiculous but NIST cannot even agree with itself about the facts. Shyam Sunder (Lead Investigator for NIST) actually stated at a press conference in 2008 that for building 7 to fall in free fall was impossible and he even gave the correct reasons why. When the NIST final report on building 7 was released a few months later it stated that building 7 had in fact fallen in free fall for at least 2.25 seconds but avoided any attempt to explain how that was possible. Clearly this fact did not fit in with the propaganda interests of the program producers.

The method used by the program producers to try to discredit Harrit’s work is interesting as it is the same method of broad statements used by those still defending the official explanations. Professor Fruehan states that if he was shown a pile of dust he could find almost anything in there. Similar unsubstantiated sweeping generalisations are what the official story has always been based on. Was Fruehan asked to analyse a sample of the dust? The program didn’t say. The program then makes the statement that 1.2 million tonnes of building materials were pulversized that day. Interestingly there has been work done of the size of the dust clouds from the twin towers because such large pyroclastic dust clouds are typical of controlled demolitions but have never occurred with gravitation collapses. It has been estimated that the amount of energy required to produce the dust clouds was approximately 50 times that of the potential energy available in the buildings.

Also present in the dust are large quantities of iron microspheres. These are formed when droplets of molten steel is blasted into air. The surface tension causes the droplets to form into spheres which then solidify in the air before dropping to the ground. The problem with that is that office fires and even jet fuel fires are not sufficiently hot enough to melt steel so there had to be a substance such as thermate to provide the heat. The iron microspheres were so common in the dust samples that they became the official investigations method of identifying if a particular sample of dust came from the towers. NIST never accounted for the microspheres in their explanations and actively avoided questions about the molten metal found at the base of towers 1, 2 and 7.

I found the explanation of Professor Pistorius’s theory on why Harrit’s work has gone unchallenged to be incredible; “It hasn’t been proved wrong because everyone is too busy to look at it”. Again this is typical of the general statements made by those who have not looked at the actual evidence. If Harrit was a typical stereotype conspiracy theorist then fine but he’s a Professor at Copenhagen University. Pistorius even states that Harrit’s work would be fairly easy to rebut but everybody’s got more interesting things to do which sounds like “I can’t prove it wrong so I’m not even going to try”.

38:00 Flight 93

This is the area of 911 which I know least about but even here the program made no reference to the calls made on mobile phones prior to the crash. In 2001 it was impossible for anyone to make a call on a mobile phone from an aircraft travelling at altitude. Several years later Boeing held a press conference to announce that it had fitted a relay station to its latest model of aircraft to enable such phone calls. This fact was not investigated in the program.

47:00 Explain away conspiracy theorists by comparing them to Hollywood

This section just made me laugh out loud. Rather than carry out an objective analysis of the facts behind why there is a rapidly growing truth movement the program moves on to attack people like myself and explains why we are misguided. It is a classic case of if all else fails then try a personal attack. The reason I question the official version of events for 911 and spend the time to write letters like this is not because I cannot handle reality. It is actually because having an engineering degree and having spent 9 years in the Fire Service I have a very good understanding of the built environment and know that the official story not only makes no sense but is actually scientifically impossible. There are so many problems with the official account but we have a world which has been directly shaped as a consequence of that one event. If we do not hold people to account then it will happen again and again.

54:00 FBI mistakes

This part of the program looked at some of the FBI mistakes which helped the hijackers. It could also have looked at the facts that Osama Bin Laden was treated in a US hospital in Saudi Arabia a few weeks before 911 or that the terrorists were given $100,000 in funding from the Pakistani secret service (a fact which the 911 commission confirmed then dismissed because it said motive was not relevant to their investigation) or even the fact that the word ‘Al Qaeda’ was created by the CIA as a name for their database of Mujahadeen fighters (disclosed by the late Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary).

57:00 Frank Spotnitz’s final speech

According to Frank I will watch this program and still carry on questioning because I’m not happy with the result. In actual fact if this program had looked objectively at some of the many issues about 911 which are being questioned by Architects and Engineers and Pilots and Colonels and Scientists and many others risking their professional credibility then at least it would have been fair. This program was clearly intended to discredit and ridicule anyone questioning whatever happens to be the latest official version of the events of that day.

58:00 “...however painful that may be for the families of those who died that day”

It was four widows of 911 victims called the ‘Jersey Girls’ who managed to get Bush to order the 911 Commission in the first place. It is Bob Mcllvaine who is spearheading the ‘remember building 7’ campaign. Many of the families of the victims want answers and do not believe what they have been told by the Bush government. Again the statement made at the close of this program was designed to make members of the truth movement look like heartless individuals who do not care.

In conclusion

Hopefully the BBC will finally start to take notice of the problems with the official story and do what it does best – investigate. It’s been ten years but it’s not too late to start however there seems to be a taboo among the mainstream media to do anything about this. 3,000 people died on 911. Since then thousands of people have died due to illnesses caused by the contaminated dust from the buildings. Millions more have died in two wars as a direct result of 911. Our service personnel have done a sterling job under difficult circumstances following directions from a government which based its decisions on a lie. We all owe it to these people to ensure they did not simply die to make others rich.

Start producing programs which look at the scientific facts. If you do then it will not take you long to start asking the kind of questions that thousands of people in the truth movement are asking right now. I’m not asking the BBC to join the truth movement just to do what it is currently not doing and provide unbiased coverage.

Here we go again!

After writing this I watched the latest contribution called ‘911 Conspiracy Road Trip’. To be honest I could do a similar write up for this program. The program seemed to take 5 people who were not that clued up on the events of 911 and tried to ‘make them see sense’ by using some extremely dodgy expert explanations. If they could not be ‘reached’ then they were pitied. This program would have been fairer by taking 10 people, 5 who believe the official explanation and 5 who don’t and allowing them to watch a series of debates between experts for both sides. Because of this I do not feel this program was even worth the effort of a comprehensive complaint except as an aside in this one. “It was possible for the terrorists to perform complex manoeuvres in airliners flying at 30% above their top speeds because someone can land a light aircraft after half an hour at landing speed with an instructor sat beside them.” Ask the pilots for 911 truth about that one! Also, the thermite demo was farcical. National Geographic tried a similar demo in the US and an engineer from Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth did a few DIY experiments in his back yard and made them look ridiculous (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOM_U5UM6Q).

Yours Faithfully

Adrian Mallett B.Eng (Hons).