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media rootsLUMPENPROLETARIAT—I have intended to cross-post over time various MediaRoots.org articles here at Lumpenproletariat.org, especially those to which I have contributed work.  But time constraints always prevail.  One of the main reasons we invest time, energy, and resources into citizen journalism is to help preserve historical archives of information often ignored by corporate or for-profit media, which gets buried or deleted over time.  So, it has been disappointing to find some of the more provocative and, arguably, important articles at Media Roots are now missing.

Fortunately, other independent bloggers have preserved copies of some of my past work with Media Roots, including transcripts.  For the most part, I most readily notice those articles I worked on which are now missing from Media Roots.  As noted above, I lost contact with Media Roots founder Abby Martin around 2013 when I focused on finishing a degree in economics and she moved to Washington, D.C. to begin work on Breaking the Set for RT.  But I do recall speaking with Abby about various articles having been jumbled about when Media Roots redesigned its website during that time.  The following article is a transcript of a Media Roots Radio podcast about 9/11, which Abby asked me to produce for Media Roots in 2012 [1].



MEDIA ROOTS—[c. 2012] This is a special 2 hour 20 minute episode of Media Roots Radio about 9/11.  In this edition, Abby and Robbie Martin introduce how their political awakenings were prompted by 9/11, and break apart the official government and corporate media narrative of the 9/11 attacks by discussing the foreknowledge, government complicity, and gross inconsistencies regarding every aspect of the events.  The show then delves into the aftermath: the psychological manipulation of the American psyche and the significance that this event continues to have in our nation and world.  The episode is fully transcribed and sourced below.

Media Roots


Abby Martin (c. 1:12):  “Welcome to Media Roots Radio.  This is your host, Abby Martin, creator of MediaRoots.org.

Robbie Martin (c. 1:17):  “And this is Robbie Martin.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:19):  “We wanted to start off the show by just saying that this is an independently-funded website and radio show.  And we always encourage donations if you want to see Media Roots keep going and continue broadcasting.  So, thanks so much for considering that.  And thanks so much for listening to our show.

“We’re really excited about this show today because 9/11 is the thing that woke my brother and I up, really, in the political arena and it’s really what prompted me into activism and investigative journalism.  So, I’m really excited to spend some time going through 9/11 Truth and talking about what damages the movement, what helps the movement, what we find to be the most credible evidence.  And we’re gonna always discern between speculation and fact.  And we’re gonna sort through all the bullshit.  And just, really, get to the solid evidence.  And, really, just discuss it.  I’m just excited about it.

“So, I think one really important thing to point out before we even begin is to say that my brother [Robbie] and I believed the official story of 9/11 for years.  We didn’t have a reason to question it, really.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:28):  “Parts of it.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:29):  “Parts of it.  I completely believed the official story for years and years.  So, we didn’t immediately think that 9/11 was an inside job.  We’re not naturally conspiracy theorists.

“So, we just wanted to talk a little bit about the day of 9/11 and what our thought process was.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:58):  “So, how did you hear about 9/11?  What was your first memory of it?”

Abby Martin (c. 3:04):  “My memory of 9/11:  I was a senior in high school and it was the beginning of the school year.   I remember waking up; mom showed me the TV.  And I was just watching the plane in the Tower.  And we all thought that, we didn’t know if it was an attack or not yet.  But while I was at home, before school, the other attack happened.  And I just remember thinking that the world was over.   I remember calling my friend, Tiffany, and saying, ‘the world’s over, Tiffany. We’re in World War III.’  And Howard Stern was on the radio at the time and he was talking about it.  I remember it was really, really surreal.  All day at school, everyone was just glued to the television set.  And then when the buildings collapsed it was just really horrifying.  We were all just sitting in the class watching it.  It was very, very scary.  And then that night, I mean, for the next month after that I was just glued to the television set.  And I remember thinking, just being so, so upset thinking about the people who had to make the decision to jump out of the buildings.  That was like the most upsetting part to me, envisioning what they had to go through at the last moments of their lives.”

Robbie Martin (c. 4:10):  “Were you seeing the soldier at the time?”

Abby Martin (c. 4:13):  “Yeah, I was dating Matt, who was my high school sweetheart.  And he was ultra-conservative, neocon.  So, I was coming from a really weird perspective where I was totally, like, ‘America’s been hurt. We’ve gotten attacked,’ like super patriotic.  I even drew a little picture of an eagle and an American flag and wrote a little poem about it at school.”

Robbie Martin (c. 4:40):  “What were your boyfriend’s thoughts on it?  I think you told me that he eventually wanted to enlist because of 9/11, right?  Or was he already in the Military before that?”

Abby Martin (c. 4:51):  “Yeah, he enlisted because of 9/11.”

Robbie Martin (c. 4:54):  “So, kind of, Pat Tillman style.”

Abby Martin (c. 4:56):  “Yeah, totally.  Yeah.  I mean, a lot of people did that, you know.  Yossarian did that, too.  It was like this heroic thing that they wanted to get involved with.”

Robbie Martin (c. 5:06):  “I think Corey Roe did that as well.  So, what led you from believing the official story, having a really patriotic boyfriend who enlisted in the military because of 9/11, what led you from that to believing that the official story was a lie?”

Abby Martin (c. 5:21):  “You know, we talked about this a little bit in the first episode, but I’ll briefly talk about it again.  Well, when I went to college in San Diego, I was totally blown away by the information that I learned in sociology and political science classes contextualising how we operate as a country and what our foreign policy does and how it affects the rest of the world.  So, I began to have a more critical mind of everything.  And when the Iraq war was, I mean, I really was a supporter of the Afghanistan war at the time ‘cos I just thought, you know, ‘Let’s go after and find bin Laden. It’s a justified war. Let’s go to war in Afghanistan.’  But then when we started talking about Iraq, I remember being really concerned.  I remember talking to mom on the phone, almost daily, ‘Why are we talking about Iraq? What the hell is going on?’”

Robbie Martin (c. 6:15):  “So, that was your first inkling that something was being lied about.”

Abby Martin:  “That the media was manipulating our emotions and trying to force us to support this ridiculous notion that we should go after Iraq for no reason.  So, that’s like, I immediately was just like, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’  And then, from my anti-war activism, I started getting information from different activists.  And I remember someone sent me this little video on the Pentagon.  It was only like a seven-minute video clip that just showed—”

Robbie Martin (c. 6:43):  “It was that flash video.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin :  “It wasn’t even a video.  It was that one that had the soundtrack from Fight Club in the background.”

Abby Martin (c. 6:49):  “Yeah, exactly.  You have a really good memory.  And I just remember watching it in my dorm room and thinking, ‘This is really weird. This doesn’t make sense.’  It just piqued my curiosity.  I was just like, huh, that’s really weird.”

Robbie Martin (c. 7:02):  “So, in a way, that video, for a lot of people, was kind of like the proto-Loose Change.  It was like the catalyst to get a lot of young people like ourselves interested in finding out more about 9/11.”

Abby Martin (c. 7:12):  “Yeah.  And then I think I didn’t even really think about it for like the next year until you showed me some Alex Jones footage.  And I was just like, ‘Oh, my god, I cannot deal with this right now. This is way too much for me to even, like, deal with.’  It was really overwhelming and really, just, scary.  And I remember his approach was just, kind of, really turned me off when I first saw, I think it was, ‘Road to Tyranny’ or ‘Martial Law.’  I’m not sure which one it was, but then slowly over time I became more open to the information.

“I saw the GNN documentary, ‘911 – Aftermath: Unanswered Questions,’ and then saw ‘Loose Change.’  And I was just like, ‘Oh, my god.’  And I just threw myself into research.  After watching ‘Loose Change’ and the GNN, then I sat down and watched [‘Martial Law The Road to Tyranny’].  I was just completely obsessed with finding out if everything in there was true or false.

“My friend Alicia and I threw ourselves into research.  We printed out all the oral testimonies from 9/11 that Dr. Griffin talks about.  We went through every bit of testimony.  We went and printed out every single news article that talked about these inconsistencies and we catalogued them in a giant database, mostly just to try to prove it wrong.  I mean, who the hell wants to believe that this is true?  You know?

“So, slowly, of course, we realised that it was true.  And we wanted to become bullet-proof in our knowledge.  And we wanted to make sure that this was accurate information.  You know?  It was.”

Robbie Martin (c. 8:45):  “So, how did you get from that point to having your mind blown by all these facts you were learning about 9/11 to actually deciding to go into some kind of activism locally, in San Diego, and on the internet as well?”

Abby Martin (c. 9:01):  “Sure.  Let me back up a couple of minutes.  When I first found out about 9/11 and I was really blown away by the information, I still was really nervous to talk to people about it.  I didn’t really feel inclined to share the information with anyone.  I thought it was really out there; it was really insane-sounding.  I didn’t wanna go there with anyone.  I didn’t really know that many people who were political.  I remember I was working at a coffee shop and this girl, Alicia, and this guy, Jake, who I was working with, I overhead Jake, my manager, talking about 9/11.  And I just kind of went over and just was eavesdropping and he said something about the buildings being blown up.  And I was like, ‘Oh, my god. You’ve heard this information?’  I was like, ‘Have you seen that movie?’  And we just started talking about it.  And then Alicia was like, ‘Wait. What?’ She’s like, ‘What are you guys talking about?’  And that was the first time I’d ever heard anyone discussing it.  And I became extremely confident in knowing that other people knew this and that other people were talking about it.

“So, that’s when Alicia and I, my other employee there, we just completely threw ourselves into research and became semi-obsessed with finding out the facts.  But it really gave me the confidence knowing that other people knew and other people cared about it.  It really gave me the confidence to go out there and spread the information.  I mean, the more that I learned and the more that I knew how true it was, the more I was inclined to go out there, tell everyone I knew.  I just thought this is the most important thing we need to expose, obviously.  It’s the premise of everything the [G.W.] Bush Administration was doing at the time.  And it could be the catalyst to dissolve the entire government and our entire country.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, you could unspin the whole ball of yarn by going back to 9/11.”

Abby Martin (c. 10:47):  “Yeah.  I initially just started going out and doing individual activism.  I remember talking to people in the anti-war movement and they were just really turned off by 9/11 Truth stuff.  This was around 2004.”

Robbie Martin (c. 11:00):  “So, this was, kind of, the first time you encountered the gatekeeper phenomenon.”

Abby Martin:  “Oh, yeah, big time.  So, then I would just start going to different speakers.  I remember I went to Greg Palast.  I made a little home-made shirt off Café Press that said ‘Question 9/11.  And I’d just go to a bunch of anti-war activism events and I’d just wear the shirt and try to pass out information to people.  I printed out a little fact-sheet and I was trying to spread it around.  And I would go into different audiences at different speaking engagements and try to ask questions about 9/11.  I remember Greg Palast totally was just like, blew me off.  And a lot of people were really turned off by what I was doing, but I felt like it was the right thing to do.

“And one time, this was like the best day ever, one time I showed up at an event and I saw a little tiny booth that said San Diegans For 9/11 Truth.  And it was like this older couple, Elise and Ted, sitting behind the booth.  And I was like, ‘Oh, my god, there’s other people out here who know that this is like the real thing that you should be, like, pushing for.’  And, so, after that, I became involved with San Diegans for 9/11 Truth.  And then I started the meet-up group.  And then I met Peter [Holmes] and we just put everything into getting out there on the streets and spread information.  And then Truther.org was, kind of, a failed attempt to try to make it cool, try to do something different where we were, like, ‘Dude, the truth is cool.’

Robbie Martin:  “Well, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Abby Martin (c. 12:17):  “Live and learn.”

Robbie Martin (c. 12:19):  “It’s in the same way, kind of, the Jesse Ventura news show embraces the term conspiracy theory.  It’s just trying to redefine the language that these enemies of the [Truth] Movement have tried to turn against us.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, exactly.  And, so, what about you?  What do you remember about the day of 9/11?  And how did you become awakened politically from 9/11 Truth?”

Robbie Martin (c. 12:37):  “Well, before I go into my little story I think we should let the audience know that if they want to go straight to our discussion about 9/11 skip forward about ten minutes in the broadcast, if you’re feeling bored by our little autobiographical histories here about 9/11.

“But on the day of 9/11, for me, I was also pretty much convinced by the official story like you were.  On the morning of 9/11, my girlfriend was with me.  I was with my roommate, Ben.  And my girlfriend at the time was a Japanese citizen.  She had kind of broken me a little bit of my paradigm, of having that natural born, you  know, you’re born with this American jingoism that’s instilled in you from cradle to grave, basically, in the United States.  So, she helped me break free of that.  She took me to the Hiroshima Museum in Japan.  She would tell me histories and alternate things that Japanese people would believe about World War II and things like the fire bombings, things like that, things that were very hard for me to actually believe and wanna put myself in the shoes of someone we went to war with.

“So, anyways, that morning mom called me, probably after she woke you up and she said, ‘Robbie, the World Trade Center’s under attack.’  So, I turn on the TV and it was already when the second plane had just hit the World Trade Center.  So, both towers had a fire on them and within, I think, 40 minutes of watching the television, the second tower collapsed before our very eyes.  And when it collapsed, Ben and I were just, we were horrified, but we were also—”

Abby Martin (c. 14:26):  “Ben was your roommate, right?”

Robbie Martin (c. 14:28):  “—yeah, Ben was my roommate.  And Ben is also, kind of, a guy who’s helped me see things from different perspectives.  He has an interesting background.  He was an altar boy until he was 17.  And he’s just really politically knowledgeable.  He’s got a lot of interesting beliefs.  But we were watching the tower collapse and we just both exclaimed and looked at each other, ‘That looks so much like a movie pyrotechnic effect. How did that look so good?’  I hate to use the term good looking in that sense, but it really did look like a Hollywood-quality pyrotechnic special effects crew practical effect, like the most elaborate one that I’d ever seen, like something out of a ‘Transformers’ Michael Bay movie or something.  So, we were just like, ‘Wow! That looked perfect. How did that happen? That’s amazing that it looked so much like a movie explosion.’

“So, we didn’t really connect that or we weren’t too suspicious about it to the point of thinking, ‘Well, this had to have been blown up.’  We just, kind of, thought it was crazy coincidental.  The building looked so perfect falling down.  But then later that day I remember the media started to pick up that emotional, visceral, rage against, ‘Who are we gonna get? Who do we go after? Who did this?’  You know?  ‘We gotta,’ just like Bush stood on the mound and said, ‘They’re gonna hear from us soon.’  It was all this blood-thirsty—”

Abby Martin (c. 15:50):  “That stupid photo of him with the three fire-fighters with the flag.”

Robbie Martin :  “—yeah, and he basically was saying that we’re gonna get revenge and kill whoever did this.”

Abby Martin (c. 15:56):  “Right.  The evildoers.

Robbie Martin (c. 16:00):  “Yeah, which is what all Americans wanted to do at the time, including most people that I knew.  I mean, I remember the days after that happened within a week after 9/11 I was getting into arguments every day with people that I knew about why we shouldn’t go into Afghanistan to go after one person.  That was the argument that I was using at the time because I thought bin Laden probably did do 9/11.  I didn’t have any reason to doubt it.  I believed the official story.  But I knew.  I was like, ‘We gotta do somethin’. We have to do something. We can’t let this stand.’  You know?”

Abby Martin (c. 16:30):  “This will not stand, man.”

Robbie Martin (c. 16:31):  “And it’s like, ‘Well, okay.’  I can understand wanting to do something, wanting to capture and kill the people who did 9/11, but going to attack an entire country and invade an entire country full of innocent people, it didn’t make any sense to me.  And it still doesn’t.  And I think it shouldn’t make sense to most Americans today.”

Abby Martin (c. 16:48):  “One really funny thing, just a side-note about Afghanistan, there was just a poll done in the most war-torn areas of Afghanistan and it was noted that over 90% of Afghanis do not know what 9/11 is.”

Robbie Martin (c. 17:01):  “I’m not surprised.”

Abby Martin (c. 17:01):  “They’re just, like, poor goat-herders that are like, ‘Why the hell have we been getting killed for the past nine years.’  Like, ‘What?’  So, that is interesting, just the detachment that we have from quote-unquote, ‘Winning the hearts and minds of these people.’  I mean, come on, they don’t even know why we’re there.”

Robbie Martin (c. 17:17):  “It really is.”

Abby Martin (c. 17:18):  “So, first you thought this is really coincidental that these buildings just fell in this way.  So, how many years after did you believe the official story?  Or when did you start questioning the official story?”

Robbie Martin (c. 17:33):  “Well, I started questioning the propaganda pretty early on.  I started to become very incensed and very upset at the fact that the media was clearly trying to manipulate us into going to war with Afghanistan and then, later, Iraq.  I mean, that was, just off the bat, that was completely bullshit, totally baseless, the whole speech to the U.N. that Colin Powell did while holding up the little vial of anthrax and showing the mobile weapon labs.  As I watched it on TV I knew that it was a lie.  It was just an elaborate ruse.”

Abby Martin (c. 18:07):  “But you just thought that they were manipulating 9/11 to just pursue—”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  I thought that, and that’s the most cynical belief that most people on the Left have is that they used 9/11 as the perfect opportunity, the perfect storm, to get all this agenda done that they’ve always wanted to get done, which is, kind of, like the Oliver Stone perspective on 9/11.”

Abby Martin (c. 18:25):  “Which is just so funny.  If you believe that, then how come you’re not willing to look at the event itself that they do use?  You know?  It’s just funny.  It’s like, if you’re willing to go far enough to think they used 9/11 to kill millions of people in other countries, why are you unwilling to look at the event that was the catalyst for that?  It’s just interesting.”

Robbie Martin (c. 18:44):  “I think it’s just too hard for people to wrap their head around.  So, I went from believing that our government and our media was totally lying to us, more than I’d ever seen before.  In my whole lifetime I don’t remember another time where the media was so clearly manipulating our emotions by calling everybody that attacked us in Iraq a terrorist, by throwing the word terrorism around every day—”

Abby Martin:  “The chart.”

Robbie Martin:  “—like they did, by telling, yeah, the colour-coded chart, by telling us to get duct tape on our windows.  I was horrified by all that.  I thought it was disgusting.  And it was actually working on me, too.  I was afraid of things, but then after that I think I saw that same video about the Pentagon.  You showed me that video.”

Abby Martin:  “M-hm.”

Robbie Martin (c. 19:30):  “And it really got my curiosity piqued because I remember on the day of 9/11 I was wondering, where was the video of the Pentagon being hit by a plane?  I never saw it and it, kind of, just went off my radar.  I never thought about it anymore.  But that video brought it back for me and it took me head first into the rabbit hole.  I remember after I watched that video I went online and the only 9/11 truth movie I was able to find right away, or I’m sorry, let me back-track.

“After you showed me that Pentagon video I went to New York City for the first time.  I just happened to be going there.  And I didn’t really know; I thought that the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act was dangerous and I thought that Homeland Security was bad, but I didn’t really know the real life effects of having all this extra security and the chilling effect that it would have until I actually went to New York City in 2003.  And in New York City they had armed guards in the subways with AK-47s, army fatigues, soldiers, like, young soldiers, they looked like Israeli soldiers, like, 19-, 20-year old soldiers carrying machine guns.  And as I walked to the subway, I remember thinking this makes me feel a lot less safe.  This is not making me feel safe.  And it’s actually making me think about what would happen if there was some sort of attempted terrorist attack in the subway with five armed guards—”

Abby Martin (c. 20:55):  “All hell would break loose.”

Robbie Martin:  “They would mow down a bunch of innocent civilians.  It doesn’t even make sense for protection to have something like that.  And I remember, just kind of, for fun, I went up to one of the soldiers and asked them to take a picture.  And they were really pissed off.  Like, they were mad that I even, like, bothered to talk to them.  Like, these were the people that were supposed to be protecting us.  You know?”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin (c. 21:13):  “And then I remember, you know, I’m in New York City.  I’m in Manhattan.  I wanna go to the New York Stock Exchange.  I wanna go to the Statue of Liberty.  I wanna go to the Empire State Building, all the generic, touristy stuff that you always wanna do.  I remember that scene from ‘Ferris Bueller’ where they’re sitting up there in the New York, or it’s like the Chicago Stock Exchange or something, but it looks just like what you see from the New York Stock Exchange.  So, I always wanted to go see that floor, you know, see those people doing the symbols and doing all the fast trades.”

Abby Martin (c. 21:39):  “The papers, holding up those coloured things.”

Robbie Martin (c. 21:41):  “Yeah!  And we went to Wall Street and, as we were walking down to Wall Street there was a S.W.A.T. team tank just sitting on the street.”

Abby Martin:  “What year was this?”

Robbie Martin (c. 21:50):  “This was 2003.”

Abby Martin:  “Wow.”

Robbie Martin (c. 21:51):  “And there was like five, like, S.W.A.T., like, special ops, like, military guys, walking around, like, ambulating with machine guns.  And I’m thinking this is not right.  Like, this shouldn’t be happening.  And then when we went up to the New York Stock Exchange.  They were like, ‘Oh, yeah, after 9/11, no civilians are allowed inside.’  And I was like, ‘Okay, well, that’s kind of sad.’”

Abby Martin (c. 22:16):  “Yeah, which is so funny.  They say, ‘Don’t let it affect your lifestyle. Let’s not let the terrorists win.’”

Robbie Martin (c. 22:21):  “Yeah, talk about chilling effect.”

Abby Martin:  “Really?  ‘Cos you guys are, like, totally preventing us from actually living how we want to.”

Robbie Martin (c. 22:27):  “Yeah, and then Statue of Liberty, same thing, I called to try to figure out when their hours were—closed indefinitely, nobody allowed inside.  Okay, so whatever.  Next up, Empire State Building, I wanted to go up to the top of the Empire State Building, generic thing, the end of ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ they’re going up the Empire State Building, you know, whatever.  I call the Empire State Building.  You can pay to go up in the elevator, but you can’t go to the top floor, the lookout point because of 9/11, again.  Every building that I called that I wanted to go to a lookout point on in New York, closed because of 9/11, every clock tower, everything.  I mean I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for buildings to go up and just see the skyline from high up in New York City, not able to happen at all.”

Abby Martin:  “Unbelievable.”

Robbie Martin (c. 23:12):  “And that made me realise that the chilling effect of 9/11 is directly affecting New Yorkers, but they’re not complaining about it openly because they’re, they seem like they feel safer as a result and Americans don’t even know about this in other parts of the country.  And then I remember while I was in New York City, I found a video in a video store, ‘9/11: In Plane Site.’  And it talked about how 9/11 was an inside job on the back of the movie cover.  So, we rented it and went back to my friend’s apartment in SoHo.  We watched it.  And I remember it was filled with a lot of disinformation.  It was, I mean, I’m sure people who’ve seen ‘911: In Plane Site’ know what I’m talking about by this.  But there were several things in it that were irrefutable—“

Abby Martin:  “That were just jarring.”

Robbie Martin :  “—and that I could never forget.  I saw for the first time ever Building 7 collapsing.  And that shook me to the core because you are watching a building clearly being imploded by controlled demolition on the day of 9/11 during a national emergency.

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin (c. 24:14):  “And you know that someone had to have wired that building for controlled demolition months in advance.  So, that completely undermines the idea that this was some kind of surprise attack.  ‘We didn’t know it was coming.’  Somebody knew it was coming.  And somebody decided to blow up a building that day.  So, this blew my mind.  From there I just went head first into the rabbit hole and went online to try to get any documentaries I could find.  The only ones I could find readily available at the time were ‘Painful Deceptions’ by Eric Hutching-fiend.”

Abby Martin (c. 24:44):  “Hufschmid.”

Robbie Martin :  “Hufschmid, something like that.  And that one really didn’t help me at all.  It was just really technical.  And it was a little bit weird.  The narration was too jarringly distracting.  And then I think the 9/11 movies that really woke me up was the ‘9/11 Unanswered Questions’ from GNN, which I still think is one of the best 9/11 movies.  It’s only 20 minutes long.  And George Humphrey’s—”

Abby Martin:  “Illusion.”

Robbie Martin (c. 25:14):  “Yeah, 9/11: The Great Illusion.’  This movie had more facts and more comprehensive than anything else I’d ever seen.  It had everything, basically, in it that the 9/11 Truth Movement talks about today.  It laid a lot of the groundwork for me to research things.

“And then, from there, I remember I saw ‘Loose Change’ for the first time.  I didn’t really like ‘Loose Change’ when I first saw it ‘cos I felt like it was taking a lot of the disinformation from ‘9/11: In Plane Site.’  But I still kind of appreciated that it was trying to, kind of, market itself towards young people.  It had a hip hop soundtrack.  So, that’s pretty much how I got to where I am now.  I mean, even watching movies with disinformation helped me get to a point of more knowledge and a better ability to be a critical thinker because I think people have this problem where, if they see something with disinformation in it, they can’t separate it.  Or if they see something with bad information in it, they can’t separate it from the good information.  And that’s a shame.”

Abby Martin (c. 26:12):  “Right.  And it’s easier to just say, ‘Well, it’s disinformation.’”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  I mean there’s disinformation in a lot of stuff.  You know, it’s hard to escape sometimes.”

SOUNDCLOUD Musical Instrumental (c. 27:56) “At The Heart Of It All” (Aphex Twin remix) from the album “Further Down the Spiral” by Nine Inch Nails, 1995.

Abby Martin (c. 28:04):  “9/11 is so important, still.  And people have told me, I’m not really like a 9/11 freak activist anymore; I’m more into media and investigative journalism about a lot of stuff.  But it’s still so important.  And when I talk to people about it, they’re just like, ‘Oh, ‘Well, a lot of people will just be like, ‘It’s nine years ago, get over it, like, it’s not relevant anymore.’  It will always be relevant.”

Robbie Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Abby Martin (c. 28:25):  “It is the turning point into this soft fascism that we are seeing.  It was the crux of everything.  It was the premise of the entire Administration’s aggressive agenda against us and against the rest of the world.

Robbie Martin (c. 28:40):  “Yeah, I mean, people who say that it’s, you know, ‘Get over it, it’s been nine years,’ I mean, those are the type of people who willingly put their head in the sand.  They don’t wanna, they want to just continue on with their lives unhindered by the media, the depressing events they hear in the media.  It’s the same kind of people who are just like, ‘Why do you read the news? It’s so depressing.’  You know?  ‘Why do you even care?’  It’s like, ‘Well—”

Abby Martin (c. 29:02):  “Because it’s enlightening.”

Robbie Martin:  “That’s reality.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin (c. 29:06):  “If you don’t wanna face reality, that’s one thing.  But, I mean, admit it.”

Abby Martin:  “The worst is the positive thinkers who are just like, ‘Dude, just positively think.’ Like, ‘Don’t read the news; it’s depressing.’  All future generations are growing up now in this post-9/11 world where we’re, essentially, living—”

Robbie Martin :  “Where torture is okay.”

Abby Martin (c. 29:23):  “M-hm.  Surveillance is, just, rampant.”

Robbie Martin :  “Where if you’re an activist, you’re asking for trouble.  That’s the new thing.  It’s like—”

Abby Martin:  “You’re asking to get raided, surveilled, tracked.”

Robbie Martin:  “I mean, there’s people all the time.  I remember arguing with a whole message board full of people once where they were just like, ‘Well, these flotilla people, they knew what they were getting into. So, how could you feel sorry for them?’  It’s like, ‘What!?’  It’s like, ‘So, Civil,’ so like, if Rosa Parks was shot by the National Guard—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, she knew what she was getting into.”

Robbie Martin :  “—she knew she was breaking the law and staying on the front of the bus.  It’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?”

Abby Martin (c. 29:57):  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin :  “Has civil disobedience been that devalued in our country to the point where now everybody’s an apologist for the system and the people who defeat civil disobedience?

Abby Martin (c. 30:01):  “Homegrown terrorism, Robbie.  Homegrown terrorism.”

Robbie Martin (c. 30:05):  “It’s pretty amazing to me.”

Abby Martin (c. 30:06):  “And, if you look at 9/11, it’s been, it’s like the ultimate historical revisionism.  If you’re just looking at the event and you said this yesterday, but it’s like, historical revisionism on two levels.  One level is the official story that’s been propped up by the government apparatus and the media.”

Robbie Martin :  “That time period from 9/11 happening and then the time it was set into stone by the government’s official narrative.  It had been completely rewritten.”

Abby Martin (c. 30:30):  “Right.  And the 9/11 Commission Report was kind of like the icing on the cake.  Like he was here it is, all wrapped up in a tiny package.  It was on the New York Times bestseller list.  It read like a Tom Clancy novel.  It was just like an absurd fictional narrative.”

Robbie Martin :  “Well, it basically holds as much factual weight as a Tom Clancy novel.  None of it’s sourced or none of it’s referenced back to actual criminal evidence, investigative evidence.  It’s just completely a, it’s like a run-on narrative detective story, if you’ve ever read it.  It’s pretty astonishing that people accept that as evidence—”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin :  “—that 9/11 was performed by 19 members of Al-Qaeda, directed by bin Laden.  There’s absolutely no proof or evidence of any kind in the book to show that.

Abby Martin (c. 31:09):  “Absolutely.  And that’s why it’s so crucial for us.  I mean, if we know anything about American history, it’s the fact that we, you know, it’s all revised.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “We learn real histories.  So, why the hell would you take a book that the government wrote and say this is absolute fact.  Of course, it’s not.”

Robbie Martin (c. 31:24):  “And what’s interesting to me is a lot of other people I argue about 9/11, you know, I’ll try to explain to them how the official 9/11 Report is completely debunked.  It’s false.  And I’ll be like, ‘Well, so what,’ like ‘just ‘cos the official story’s been debunked doesn’t mean you know what happened on 9/11.’  It’s like, I’m not saying that I know what happened on 9/11.  I’m just trying to tell you that what we’ve been told happened on 9/11 is a complete lie and used to manipulate us into all these endless wars, perpetual war, and this erosion of our civil liberties.  I want people to find out who did it.  But I’m not a criminal investigator.  I’m not a forensics investigator.  I don’t have the means to do that.”

Abby Martin (c. 32:02):  “Yeah, we don’t have subpoena power.  We can’t actually access the evidence that’s needed to find out what we wanna find out.”

Robbie Martin:  “So, that takes us back to another thing that a lot of lackadaisical people, or even debunkers, like to say is, they say, like, I remember hearing Jesse Ventura on the Dennis Miller show a couple weeks back and, of course, Dennis Miller is such a neocon little twerp, that he’s gonna get into it with Jesse Ventura about 9/11.  So, he asked him, ‘Jesse, now I heard you talk about 9/11, but gimme some names.  Who was in on it?’

Abby Martin:  “‘Name some names who did it.’”

Robbie Martin (c. 32:39):  “So, basically, you’re putting someone in a position, who has no criminal subpoena power, who’s not an investigator, to publicly commit defamation on the radio and label someone as a mass murderer.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin :  “That’s putting someone in a position that’s not really fair.  That’s not how you start an argument or a debate about how 9/11 was orchestrated.  You don’t ask someone to divulge names.  That’s the end of the investigation.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin :  “I mean, come on.  It’s just completely illogical.  And Dennis Miller knows he’s being a child when he does that.”

Abby Martin:  “You saw his logic when he followed up by just saying, ‘You know, I just can’t go there.  I just can’t go there.’  It’s like, okay, well, there you go.”

Robbie Martin (c. 33:13):  “Well, you can’t go there because you’re a freaking child.”

Abby Martin (c. 33:15):  “Well, then why are you even talking about it?”

Robbie Martin (c. 33:16):  “I mean, I’m sorry that it’s too traumatic for you to go there.  I’m sorry.”

Abby Martin:  “It’s like, ‘Don’t talk about 9/11. If you can’t go there, then why are you even bringing it up?  If you are unwilling to look at any evidence then please don’t talk about it.”

Robbie Martin:  “And, yeah, going along with, that’s a perfect example of just how much the 9/11 Truth Movement has been demonised and not only by the media, by a ton of people.  I mean, the whole anti-war movement demonised 9/11 Truth.  And the way that they demonised, their best way of demonising, 9/11 Truth is through lies of omission and straw man arguments.  I mean, they’ve never—”

Abby Martin:  “Ad hominem.”

Robbie Martin:  “They’ve, oh, and absolutely ad hominem.  There hasn’t been one actual debunking special that I’ve ever seen that doesn’t resort to those three forms of logical fallacies.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin (c. 33:58):  “So, I could see someone doing a pretty good job of trying to debunk some of the more junk theories.  But not resort to that, but they always do.  So, that’s questionable.  It’s like, ‘Why do they have to resort to ad hominems?  It’s because their arguments are not very strong.  And if you actually look into all these debunkers’ histories, Michael Shermer, for example, the Editor of Skeptic Magazine, he claims he’s some big skeptic and has a magazine called Skeptic Magazine, so you’d think he would be a critical thinker.  However, if you listen to a lot of his statements regarding terrorism, he is terrified of Arabs.”

Abby Martin (c. 34:32):  “Yeah, we confronted him.  And he just said he couldn’t look at it either.  Like, ‘Really?’  Then why are you making special magazines based on—”

Robbie Martin :  “He’s terrified of Arab Muslims.  He thinks that terrorism is a very severe threat that we should take very seriously.  So, this is someone who is trapped in, sort of, a child fantasyland of being scared of bogeymen.  And he’s writing a magazine called Skeptic Magazine.  It doesn’t gel.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin :  “You can’t be a skeptic and think that.  I’m sorry.”

Abby Martin:  “And a lot of people say, ‘Oh, you’re one of those conspiracy theorists. You’re a conspiracy theorist. You just believe in, what, do you think the moon landing wasn’t real?’  It’s like, well, first of all, let’s look at the word conspiracy theory.  It’s a very pejorative term.”

Robbie Martin :  “It means now, basically, it’s like calling someone an idiot.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  But if you look at it, let’s get this out of the way, 9/11 was a conspiracy.  I think everyone can agree with the fact that 9/11 was conspired by someone.

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  Of course.”

Abby Martin:  “So, the term conspiracy theory is so erroneous.  It doesn’t hold water.

Robbie Martin :  “It’s become just as meaningless of a phrase as the term terrorism.  It’s used to describe theories or propositions that people don’t like, that are controversial.  So, if you’re offended by a theory that’s not mainstream and you don’t like it, it’s become a conspiracy theory in your mind because that’s your way of writing it off.  It’s your way of not having to actually engage in the information.  You just push it out because it’s, I think it has to do with fear.”

Abby Martin (c. 35:58):  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin (c. 35:59):  “But these people try to act like they can handle it, but they clearly can’t.

Abby Martin (c. 36:04):  “And we, both, pretty much agree that, there’s a lot of theories about 9/11 of people who think that it might have been somewhat an inside job.  A lot of people think our government let it happen, that there were all these warnings.  And we’ll get into that in a second.”

Robbie Martin (c. 36:21):  “I think it’s good to mention a lot of the people we know who entertain the notion of 9/11 being an inside job, at least most of the people I know, only go as far as LIHOP.

Abby Martin (c. 36:30):  “Right.  Which is ‘let it happen.’”

Robbie Martin :  “MIHOP is too far for them.

Abby Martin (c. 36:33):  “People either think they let it happen or they made it happen, which, in my mind, letting it happen is making it happen.”

Robbie Martin :  “Absolutely.”

Abby Martin:  “There’s no difference.  I mean, there is a difference when get into the, actually, the facilitation of certain things to help carry it out.  But if you’re just looking at, if you do believe that our government let it happen, that they had all these warnings, that they knew exactly when it was gonna happen, and that they used it to—”

Robbie Martin :  “And that they removed obstacles to let it happen.”

Abby Martin:  “—right; that is still, should be, just as bad.

Robbie Martin (c. 37:00):  “Absolutely.  I mean, I think it was Alex Jones who came up with this little imagination exercise where, imagine if you run a bank.  You’re the bank manager.  And you have a friend, or you know someone who wants to rob the bank, and you wanted to let them rob the bank.  You could do things like unlock the doors, give them the code to the safe, make sure the surveillance camera is ‘accidentally’ turned off, things like that.  So, is that letting it happen?  ‘Cos you’re not the one who actually committed the robbery, but you created a situation where the robbery could go off without a hitch.

“So, in my mind you’re just as criminally involved if you were the robber themselves.  So, it’s interesting that people make this distinction where, ‘Well, I could see why they would’ve let it happen and just, kind of, stood back.  But I can’t; that doesn’t work.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin (c. 37:53):  “You can’t.  It just doesn’t make sense.  That is making it happen.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin :  “It’s a silly distinction in my opinion.”

Abby Martin:  “And before we get into all the facts and evidence about why we think 9/11 was definitely an inside job, another really common response that we get when we talk to people about this is just like what you said about Jesse Ventura.  They want names.  They need you to speculate.  They can’t accept evidence that we tell people.  They’re like, ‘Well, who did it? What was their motive?’  We don’t need to know an alternative narrative that fits the pieces.  All we need to know is that the official story is a lie.”

Robbie Martin (c. 38:33):  “Yeah.  And that there’s clearly some things in it that, not only is the official story a lie, but there’s so many coincidences that lined up that day where there had to be some kind of inside involvement inside the government apparatus to some level.  And I think back to what you were saying is people, it’s like they need you to close the circle for them.  They don’t have the mental, the critical thinking abilities to be able to take these individual facts and come up with their own thoughts.  They need you to, like, hand them the whole thing from beginning to end.  Like a story book.”

Abby Martin:  “Exactly.  And a perfect example, I’d just got involved in a Facebook thread where someone was arguing with each other about 9/11 and I just, kind of, went in there and I said, ‘Look, this isn’t even up for debate anymore.’  I was like, ‘thermite, thermitic materials have been found. It’s in a peer-reviewed study, blah, blah, blah.’  And she wrote me back and she was like, ‘But who?’ like kept demanding; she refused to even comment.

Robbie Martin :  “I’m sorry I’m not psychic.”

Abby Martin:  “She refused to comment on the evidence until I would tell her my theory and then when I finally did say, ‘This is all speculation, but this is what I think may have happened,’ she was just like, ‘Oh, I don’t believe that.’  And I was like, ‘How easy for you to just, like, totally discredit me. But you put me into a corner where you wanted that.’”

Robbie Martin (c. 39:45):  “Yeah.  It’s just an unfair way of arguing.  It’s actually called changing the goal post.  It’s a logical fallacy where once you’ve lost one component of the argument, you change the argument to something else, so you could appear that you keep winning.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin:  “People do that with me all the time in arguments because it’s, once you learn, it’s really hard for someone to admit they’re wrong and be like, ‘You know what, you’ve gotten me curious; I’m gonna look into it.’  Just like a lot of my friends, who are more technically apt people.  I sent one of ‘em the thermite paper.  And his immediate response was, oh, well, here’s a debunking website that says that those red grade chips are actually something else.  And it’s like for him that convinced him that there was no validity whatsoever to the thermite paper.  And to me, it’s like, each one of those documents should be looked at thoroughly and should be looked at with a critical mind.  But instead, he immediately looked at the debunking one and let it completely cancel out the other one without even really being a critical thinker about it, just kind of like a knee-jerk reaction.”

Abby Martin (c. 40:48):  “Absolutely.  And, yeah, I love the coincidence theory because that’s really what people adhere to, the ‘let-it-happen’ thing.  It’s just like, ‘Well, a hundred coincidences must have happened in one day for everything to have gone off without a hitch.  You know, I mean, that’s what you have to believe.  You have to believe that there was so many coincidences; that everything lined up perfectly for these 19 Arabs.”

Robbie Martin :  “And I think that you can really completely omit any controlled demolition theories from that and you still have hundreds of coincidences to line up perfectly for that to happen.  You don’t even have to go into controlled demolition to absolutely prove that there was some sort of inside involvement in 9/11.  I mean, just the airline stock trading alone shows that somebody knew it was coming and somebody made money off of it.

Abby Martin (c. 41:32):  “Yeah, just to give our audience a clearer picture of what we’re talking about.  There were put options betting that the stocks would fail in the airliners that were involved in 9/11.  And when it was investigated further, when the investigation was prompted into who put these put options and who bet that these stocks would fail, what was it?  The FBI said—”

Robbie Martin (c. 41:53):  “That the investigation was dropped because it showed that there was no connection to Al-Qaeda.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, it’s like, ‘What?’”

Robbie Martin :  “Actually, that’s far more interesting that there’s no connection to Al-Qaeda, that some Wall Street banker knew that the attack was coming.  I mean, I’m sorry.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, that to me is much more like expository, that it was done by old, White, bankers instead of Arab Al-Qaeda operatives.”

Robbie Martin:  “That fact alone, singularly, is extremely powerful.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin:  “And the fact that someone can look at that and be able to just write it off as a coincidence is pretty amazing to me.”

Abby Martin (c. 42:33):  “And just to make this clear, there are put options done everyday randomly.  But the most glaring inconsistency about this particular day is that it was like ten times, fifteen times, higher than average.  It was, like, overwhelmingly, people were betting for this to fail.  It wasn’t just like a normal thing.  Once again, coincidence, that on this day everyone just somehow bet way more on these particular stocks.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, let’s talk about a few other coincidences that it was the biggest suicide attack in history, if you wanna pretend like there really were the 19 hijackers that committed the attacks on their own.  It was the largest suicide attack ever performed that killed the most people in history.  That, in and of itself, was a coincidence.  It’s a coincidence that four hijackers were able to take over the plane, storm the cockpit, and take over the controls of a commercial airliner with box-cutters.  That’s a coincidence.  That’s very hard for me to believe even that, alone.”

Abby Martin (c. 43:33):  “Another coincidence is that none of the four pilots set off the hijacking signal, which is standard protocol in training.

Robbie Martin :  “And it’s set up in such a way where it’s like a bank teller being robbed where it’s like underneath the counter, so they could flip the switch without anybody noticing them.  That’s the whole point of it.”

Abby Martin:  “Another coincidence is that NORAD had drills going on that day that coincided inserting false blips on their radar screens.  That confused the hell out of everyone and made them think that they were dealing with an exercise instead of a real-life scenario.”

Robbie Martin :  “Another coincidence that day is that [G.W.] Bush’s security detail was extremely lacking and didn’t perform the protocol that they’re supposed to perform, similar to how NORAD didn’t perform standard protocol.  Bush had three assassination attempts against him that were deemed credible within the month before 9/11.  While he was in some conference in Europe, he slept on an aircraft carrier.  So, I think that was in August.  The night before 9/11 there was a credible threat against his life that the Secret Service delivered to him.”

Abby Martin (c. 44:42):  “So, you’re saying it’s just a really big coincidence that his security personnel didn’t whisk him away immediately from the school.”

Robbie Martin :  “Well, not just that, but that, first of all, that he went to the school in the first place, that he went to Booker Elementary School when it was a completely publicly known about event after he heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, which he would’ve known instantly was part of that warning he got about the ‘bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.’”

Abby Martin:  “But he said later that he thought it was just a bad pilot.”

Robbie Martin:  “Which is a lie—”

Abby Martin:  “Total lie.”

Robbie Martin :  “—because he was told of the plane hitting the building before he left the school.  Which his staff admitted, but he claims he saw the video at the school.  That’s a lie.  The coincidence goes farther.  Not only was he still going to the school after several assassination attempts had been made against his life, credible ones, but that he stayed there for 25 minutes after he knew.”

Abby Martin (c. 45:34):  “Another coincidence is the fact that not only that all four planes were able to be hijacked, but that they were able to hit the most iconic, heavily-secured buildings in the world.  The Pentagon?  I mean, come on.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, the Pentagon is absurd.  The coincidence that the cameras did not capture the plane flying into the Pentagon, that’s a huge coincidence.

Abby Martin:  “I do not accept that the only thing we have is four frames of an object hitting the Pentagon.  I do not accept that.”

Robbie Martin:  “I mean, come on, even gas station surveillance cameras have 15-frame-a-second video cameras recording all the time.  It’s not believable.  It’s not acceptable.”

Abby Martin:  “Another coincidence is that Building 7, the first building to ever fall due to fire alone, is just such a coincidence that that building contained some of the most secure, you know, Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, Secret Service, Guiliani’s secret mayoral bunker.”

Robbie Martin :  “It was the,  I think it, I don’t know if it was FEMA, Emergency Command Center—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin:  “—bunker.”

Abby Martin:   “Yeah.  With like its own like electrical and water thing.  It’s just interesting.  It’s like, really?  So, this building was taken down.  It’s just strange.  It’s such a coincidence that this building just imploded.”

Robbie Martin (c. 47:47):  “When we’re using the term coincidence here we’re kind of using it sarcastically.  Another coincidence that really blows my mind is that the hijacker attended the Defense Language Institute, a school that specialises in intelligence language training, for being a spy, basically.  I mean, that is absurd that two hijackers lived on the roof of an FBI informant on the payroll.  Two other hijackers listed their address as the Pensacola Naval Airbase in Florida.”

Abby Martin:  “Robbie, that’s just a coincidence.  So, these are just a few of the many.  And we’ll go over everything in detail.  But we wanted to go over the absurdity to believe that all of these things just happened to fall into place like this.”

Robbie Martin (c. 47:56):  “Barbara Bush mentioned in her autobiography about six years ago that her son, [Marvin] Bush, was the head of Securacom on the, I think he had just left his job the day before 9/11.  And she was expressing relief in the book that he wasn’t part of the attack.  It’s another coincidence.”

Abby Martin (c. 48:19):  “Oh, I just remembered another giant coincidence, also, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, that document that was signed by all the PNAC crew, a lot of the Bush Administration signed this document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses.  And this was, what, a couple of months before 9/11.  And what they said was that they needed a catalysing, catastrophic event, like a new Pearl Harbor, in order to instil this new wave of imperialism that they wanted to go after these natural resources.  So, that’s a pretty big coincidence that they ended up getting exactly what they wanted.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  And the death toll was pretty much almost exactly 3,000 or so.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, exactly.  Our generation’s Pearl Harbor, so interesting.  So, starting at the very beginning, we’ve talked about this numerous times before on our show, but just the myth of Al-Qaeda as a terrorist external organisation that has a chain of command, that’s a threat, and that this linked-together network actually instigated the attack.  Let’s talk a little bit about Al-Qaeda.”

Robbie Martin (c. 49:20):  “I think it was actually on Fox News that I heard someone talking about Al-Qaeda and they were asked by the reporter, ‘Do you think Al-Qaeda did this?’  And they were a terrorism expert from the early ‘90s and the guy basically spelled it out like it is, you’ll never hear someone on the media say this.  Rarely, you will hear it actually spoken out loud.  But he said, ‘You know what, actually, Al-Qaeda is not an organisation. It’s a tactic.’  And that’s pretty much all he had to say because it’s true.  Al-Qaeda is a name that the American government came up with to describe the tactics coming out of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.  It’s not an organisation like Hezbollah or Hamas or FARC.  They don’t have an organised structure.  They don’t have an army.  In fact, I would be willing to bet and a lot of other experts agree with this that there were only maybe a hundred total members that would self-identify as this group.  But they didn’t even use the word Al-Qaeda to describe themselves.  That’s what a lot of people don’t know.  That that’s the term American—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, we gave that to them.”

Robbie Martin (c. 50:33):  “It means the base.  And it was to describe the base of Osama bin Laden from the American intelligence perspective.  The first time we ever devised this notion that Al-Qaeda is some sort of organised group or that they even call themselves Al-Qaeda was to prosecute Osama bin Laden in a U.S. court of law, using kind of a loop-hole in the law that was used to prosecute mafia organisations, to prosecute the head of an organisation where the organisation, itself, commits crimes.  So, they use that same application of the law to try to go after bin Laden, by claiming, making the case that he was the head of this mafia-like organisation and that’s how it started.”

Abby Martin (c. 51:18):  “Yeah, exactly.  And there’s a really, really amazing documentary that everyone should check out.  It’s by the BBC.  And it’s called “The Power of Nightmares.”

Robbie Martin :  “It’s narrated and created by Adam Curtis who is an awesome guy.  It’s still available on YouTube and Google Video.  Definitely check it out because it just spells out our role in the mujahideen, how the Taliban got strengthened by us in the region in the ‘80s when we were fighting Russia, and also this whole Al-Qaeda thing and how we basically made it up.  So, we’re gonna play this clip from ‘Power of Nightmares’ right now.”

Audio from “Power of Nightmares(c. 51:55)“[Adam Curtis narrating, c. 7:07] Even bin Laden’s displays of strength for the western media were faked.  The fighters in this video had been hired for the day and told to bring their own weapons.  For beyond his own small group, bin Laden had no formal organisation until the Americans invented one for him.

“In January 2001, a trial began in a Manhattan court room of four men accused of the Embassy bombings in East Africa, but the Americans had also decided to prosecute bin Laden in his absence.  But to do this, under American Law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation because, as with the mafia, that would allow them to prosecute the head of the organisation even if he could not be linked directly to the crime.  And the evidence for that organisation was provided for them by an ex-associate of bin Laden’s called Jamal al-Fadl.

“[Jason Burke, author of Al Qaeda] During the investigations of the 1998 bombings, there was a walk-in source, Jamal al-Fadl, who was a Sudanese militant who was with bin Laden in the early ‘90s, who has been passed around a whole series of Middle Eastern secret services, none of whom want much to do with him, who ends up in America and is taken on by the American Government, effectively, as a key prosecution witness and given a huge amount of the American taxpayers’ money at the same time.  His account is used as raw material to build up a picture of Al-Qaeda.  The picture the FBI want to build up is one that will fit the existing laws, so that they will have to use to prosecute those responsible for those bombings.  Now, those laws were drawn up to counteract organised crime, the mafia, drugs crime, crimes where people being a member of an organisation is extremely important.  You have to have an organisation to get a prosecution.  And you have al-Fadl, and a number of other witnesses, a number of other sources, who are happy to feed into this.  You’ve got material that, looked at in a certain way, can be seen to show this organisation’s existence.  You put the two together and you get what is the first bin Laden myth, the first Al-Qaeda myth.  And because it’s one of the first, it’s extremely influential.

“[Adam Curtis, narrating] The picture al-Fadl drew for the Americans of bin Laden was of an all powerful figure at the head of a large terrorist network that had an organised hierarchy of control.  He also said that bin Laden had given this network a name, Al-Qaeda.  It was a dramatic and powerful picture of bin Laden, but it bore little relationship to the truth.  The reality was that bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri had become the focus of a loose association of disillusioned Islamist militants who were attracted by the new strategy.  But there was no organisation.  These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance.  He was not their commander.  There was also no evidence that bin Laden used the term Al-Qaeda to refer to the name of a group until after September the 11th when he realised that this was the term the Americans had given him.

“In December, the Northern Alliance told the Americans that bin Laden was hiding in the mountains of Tora Bora.  They were convinced they had found the heart of his organisation.  For days, the Americans bombed the mountains of Tora Bora with the most powerful weapons they had.  The Northern Alliance had been paid more than a million dollars for their help and information.  And now, their fighters set off up the mountains to storm bin Laden’s fortress and bring back the Al-Qaeda terrorist and their leader.  But all they found were a few small caves, which were either empty or had been used to store ammunition.  There was no underground bunker system, no secret tunnels.  The fortress didn’t exist.  The Northern Alliance did produce some prisoners they claimed were Al-Qaeda fighters, but there was no proof of this.  And one rumour was that the Northern Alliance was simply kidnapping anyone who looked remotely like an Arab and selling them to the Americans for, yet, more money.  The Americans now began to search all the caves in all the mountains of Eastern Afghanistan for the hidden Al-Qaeda network.

“But then, the British arrived to help.  They were convinced they could hunt down Al-Qaeda because of what they said was their unique experience in fighting terrorism in Northern Ireland.  They could succeed where others had failed.

“[Brigadier Roger Lane, Commander, British Forces] The hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban goes on.  And we stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States and our other Coalition Allies in the global war of terrorism.

“[Brigadier Roger Lane, Commander, British Forces, being interviewed] ‘But how many Al-Qaeda have you captured?’  We haven’t captured any Al-Qaeda, but.  ‘And how many have you actually managed to kill here in Southeast Afghanistan?’  We haven’t killed any.

“[Adam Curtis narrating] The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al-Qaeda as an organisation did not exist.  In looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat.

“[Jason Burke, author Al Qaeda] I was with the Royal Marines, as they trooped around Eastern Afghanistan.  And every time they got a location for a supposed Al-Qaeda or Taliban element or base, they’d turn up and there was no one there.  Or there’d be a few startled shepherds.  And that struck me then as being a wonderful image for the war on terror because people are looking for something that isn’t there.”

Robbie Martin (c. 57:41):  “I think the only criticism I have of this movie is that they buy into the idea that 9/11 was not an inside job.  But it goes almost as far as saying that the whole thing was staged.  I mean, they go over the fact that Osama bin Laden hired extras to hold guns while he was walking around and make it seem like he had some kind of organisation.  They talk about how Osama bin Laden, after the 9/11 attacks, that it was the best recruitment tool ever for Osama bin Laden to get followers, that he was actually losing a lot of popularity before 9/11 happened in the Muslim or Arab world.

“Actually, I just found out about this interesting study that we did where we took a survey.  I think this might have been in the newest WikiLeaks cable leaks that there was some sort of talk about a survey among the Arab world before 9/11 on how much they liked bin Laden.  And the U.S. government was actually expressing disappointment that they didn’t like bin Laden as much as we wanted them to—like, we were upset that they weren’t loyal to this bin Laden perspective.  So, I think the memo was talking about ‘how do we get them to be more into Osama bin Laden.’”

Abby Martin (c. 58:58):  “That’s hilarious.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “And going back to bin Laden, the fact that bin Laden, we claim that that bin Laden tape that came out, what was it, like a couple of weeks after 9/11?”

Robbie Martin :  “No, it was like three months after 9/11.”

Abby Martin:  “Oh, three months after 9/11.  Okay.  Where bin Laden supposedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, but a lot of people in the movement say that it’s not bin Laden in the video.  I think it is because a lot of people just show one frame of him and say that he’s too fat and it’s an actor.  But you made a great point the other day when you said that we actually set up, we actually paid, it was a PR thing.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  It was proven.  This kind of went under the radar in the media that things the Pentagon did an operation where they had a person, an agent, working for them to pretend like they were some sort of Osama bin Laden follower and went to go interview him.  And in the video the guy basically gets bin Laden to say some that could be interpreted that he had something to do with the Al-Qaeda attacks where he says it was a miracle that the buildings fell.  That was actually probably his natural reaction ‘cos it is like a miracle that the buildings fell after they only got hit by a plane.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, absolutely.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:00:16):  “But my thoughts on that whole tape is that, yes, it’s a real tape.  Yes, it really is Osama bin Laden.  But that doesn’t add any credibility to the official story’s claim that he was behind the 9/11 attacks because of two reasons.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:00:30):  “And, also, he was denying responsibility for weeks and weeks.  This was like the first time that we actually had like something to go on.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:00:34):  “And he really doesn’t admit it that he did it.  There’s multiple translations of it, but we’ll add some links to let people figure that out for themselves.  But what’s most interesting to me about that video is that about a year ago it was proven, the media barely picked up on this, that the Pentagon set that video up.  They had bin Laden go on camera to try to coerce a confession out of him.  And they obviously didn’t pull it off that well because he doesn’t say it, really, in the video that he did the attacks.

Abby Martin:  “What’s hilarious is that if we knew where he was, we could’ve just arrested him and not have invaded a country.

Robbie Martin :  “But the funny part about that is is that like a day after the video was filmed we acted like the Afghanistan soldiers randomly found it in some shack in Afghanistan, a video tape was just sitting there about Osama bin Laden.”

Abby Martin:  “Oh, my god.”

Robbie Martin :  “So, it was set up from beginning to end and we’ll add some links to this broadcast to prove to you and to show you absolute proof that the video was a set up.  So, what I’m saying is it doesn’t matter that the video is real.  It was a set-up by the American Government.

And even if he is admitting, let’s say that he is admitting that he did the attacks in the video, which he isn’t, that’s not proof that he did it.  Police, when they have a crazy guy come in off the street saying that he killed ten people, they don’t arrest him and throw him into jail.  They do an investigation to see if his confession is true.  A confession is not evidence.  It’s only the caveat to a bunch of other evidence.  It’s the icing on the cake for a criminal investigation ‘cos then it closes the circle for them.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:02:11):  “And, you know, Chomsky just came out and said that there was absolutely no evidence linking bin Laden or Al-Qaeda to 9/11.  And what’s really interesting, also, Rex Tomb, the Chief Publicity Officer for the FBI was asked, ‘Why isn’t 9/11 listed when you look at Osama bin Laden on the most wanted FBI list?’  The crime of 9/11 is not listed by the side of his name.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:02:33):  “No.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:02:33):  “And Rex Tomb said because there’s no hard evidence.  He said there’s no hard evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11.  So, uh, what?  Why are we engaged in two wars and why is it still propped up like it’s the truth?”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:02:47):  “We should play that clip right now of Colin Powell being asked in a press conference by the reporter, ‘So, do you just expect us to trust you?’  ‘Cos he asked Colin Powell about, ‘Where’s the evidence?’  Colin Powell was all, like, ‘We’ll get you.’

Abby Martin (c. 1:02:58):  “We’ll get you a white paper.  He promises that.  We’re gonna play that clip from ‘Press For Truth’ where Colin Powell is promising to deliver a white paper linking bin Laden to the attacks.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:03:07):  “And, right before we play this clip, it also goes in line with the British version of the 9/11 official story.  Their printed official document basically starts off with a foreword saying none of the information presented in this document can be used in a court of law or for criminal prosecutions.”

Abby Martin:  “In what document?”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:03:34):  “It’s the British version of the 9/11 official story, commission.”

Abby Martin:  “Wait, the British have, like, a printed publication?”

Robbie Martin :  “It’s like their version of the 9/11 Report, yeah.  But it’s a lot smaller.”

Abby Martin:  “That’s odd.”

Robbie Martin :  “It’s more of like an internal document, but it was released to the public also.  But, yeah, let’s play this clip.”

Abby Martin:  “Okay.  Cool.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:03:50):  “I love this clip because it just shows Colin Powell in a blatant lie.  He’s just totally lying.  They never planned to produce a white paper; they just hoped that people would forget about it.

Robbie Martin :  “It’s like the last bastion of someone in the press corps actually asking a real question.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin :  “Like he’s asking a question that everyone in the press should have been asking every day for the rest of the year.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:04:16):  “Yeah, every day until they got it.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  I mean, that guy’s probably long gone now.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he was fired like the day after.”

Audio Segment of Colin Powell (c. 1:04:25):  “[journalist] The Secretary of State said the Administration would soon be able to document its case in public against the Al-Qaeda network and Osama bin Laden.

“[Colin Powell] And I think it’ll be persuasive.”

“[Press Corps journalist] But is there any plan to present public evidence, so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but people all over the world can understand the case against him?”

“[Bush Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer] Well, I think it’s like Secretary Powell said.  You know, there’s hope to do that and to do so in a timely fashion over some course of time.  But I think the American people also understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be forthcoming.  And the American people seem to be accepting of that.”

“[Press Corps journalist] It seems as though you’re asking everyone to trust you.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:05:08):  “Yeah.  I love that.  And ‘Press for Truth’ is such a great movie, too.  We really, really recommend everyone to watch ‘9/11: Press for Truth.’  It’s just a movie that tells the story of four 9/11 widows and how they really pioneered the whole investigation because the investigation was stonewalled for like over a year by the [G.W.] Bush Administration, which was unheard of.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, at first they wanted to appoint Henry Kissinger to the head of it.  The 9/11 widows were furious, so they took him off.”

Abby Martin:  “Henry Kissinger’s a known war criminal.  What a disgrace.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  And then they let Cheney and Bush testify together, not under oath, in a private room.  So—”

Abby Martin (c. 1:05:44):  “And, so, should we play the clip of Bush after he testifies and a reporter is asking him, ‘Why did you guys refuse to testify separately?’  It was almost like he needed Cheney to guide him ‘cos he didn’t know, like, he wasn’t competent enough to lie.  So, I think a lot of people who have been following basic things about 9/11 know about the Presidential Daily Briefing delivered to Bush that said ‘Bin Laden Is Determined to Strike Within the US.’

“There were also 50, more than 50, warnings.  And, still, after that first tower was hit, Bush claims that he thought it was a pilot error.  And even though they knew an attack was imminent.  People were warned not to fly, etcetera.  So, it is just curious that we still did not evacuate the second Tower, even though it was clear that they knew that it was an attack at that point.  They still wanted to almost maximise the death and destruction.  That’s what I think.  They wanted those people to die.  And it’s really, really sickening.  It makes me really, really sad to think that.  But there’s no other explanation that I can think of.  They knew that there was an attack.  And they still did not evacuate that second Tower or the Pentagon.

Robbie Martin :  “If you’re the kind of debunker or lackadaisical mindset where you’re like, ‘Oh, there were so many warnings. This is ‘hindsight is 20/20 kind of thing.’  Like, ‘If we would’ve known what we knew now we then we would’ve, looking back on it we can say, oh, yeah there were all these warnings.’  But back then they got so many warnings they didn’t know which ones to take seriously.  I’m sorry, but that’s absolute bullshit because here’s complete proof that contradicts that.  Willie Brown, Salman Rushdie, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all cancelled their flights because they got warnings not to fly.  I’m sorry, but that’s not disprovable.

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, but that wouldn’t just happen on—”

Robbie Martin :  “No.  And what does that tell you?  That we as the public were not important enough to them to be warned about this.  So, they didn’t care about civilians.  It just shows the sociopathic nature.

Abby Martin:  “That’s what people don’t understand.  They don’t care about human life.  People somehow are holding on so much to the allegiance of this nationalistic jingoism that Americans mean more to these people.  They don’t give a fuck.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:08:00):  “ No.  No.”

Abby Martin:  “They’ll fuckin’ kill you so quickly.  I’m serious.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  And they must have found a way where they didn’t have to kill Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr.  They were able to just push them out of the House.”

Abby Martin:  “To discredit them, that’s what they seem to do.  They seem to try to discredit you and demonise you.  And if that doesn’t work, then they’ll just take you out.  I mean, that‘s what they do around the world.  Look at what the CIA has been doing around the world.  They do this all the time.  Why the hell wouldn’t they do it in our own country?  It doesn’t make sense.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:08:25):  “Well, ‘cos people seem to think that the CIA does not operate domestically in that same way.  They think that these, the CIA, a lot of people just default on this position, ‘Oh, yeah, the CIA is really crazy. They’re corrupt. They do illegal things. But they do it in other countries. They kill people in other countries.’  But we know that they do things here.  Just look at, blow up on the JFK conspiracy and you’ll find that there was CIA operatives all over the place and Cuban CIA operatives all over the place ready to strike.”

Abby Martin:  “The CIA was crawling.”

Robbie Martin :  “Domestically.  Ready to strike.  Like, people who were hired to be hit squads and then to get instructions of when to kill certain people, when to plant a bomb somewhere.”

Abby Martin:  Here’s a perfect example: the CIA, 1967.  When Kennedy was President, Robert McNamara, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a document called Operation Northwoods to Kennedy.  We really wanted to go after Cuba at the time.  And in this document, this classified CIA document called Operation Northwoods, I encourage everyone to look it up.  Sounds really crazy, but it’s true.  They had plans to remote-control airliners, pretending that they were kids on board that were on their spring break.  They wanted to pretend like these planes were gonna be hijacked.  And they also, in the document, talked about shooting American civilians on U.S. soil.

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  Oh, yeah, I love it when I try and show ‘Operation Northwoods’ to people and they somehow do the mental gymnastics.  It’s pretty impressive mental gymnastics to read Operation Northwoods and then come out on the other side claiming that there’s nothing in there that says that they want to kill Americans.  I’m sorry, but it says that they wanna plant bombs in the civilian areas, kill Americans.  Shoot Americans in the head.

Abby Martin:  “And, most importantly, this was to be blamed on Cuba.  This was to be an instant, you know—”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:10:10):  “You really have to have the cognitive dissonance level of like a child who believes in Santa Clause to think that it doesn’t talk about killing Americans in Operation Northwoods.  It’s right there.  I’m sorry.”

Abby Martin:  “And this thing that we’re talking about is called false flag terrorism when states sponsor some sort of terrorist activity and blame it on someone else.  That’s exactly what Operation Northwoods was projecting.  It was projecting that we commit false flag terrorism, blame it on Cuba.  Thankfully, Kennedy rejected it.  And, which, who knows if that had anything to do with why he was assassinated or what?  But point being, they had these plans 50 years ago.

Robbie Martin (c. 1:10:52):  “I think that it would be good right now to play those two clips of Bush and Conde squirming when being asked about 9/11 foreknowledge.

Abby Martin (c. 1:11:02):  “Yeah, yeah.  Bush and Conde saying, ‘We could never imagine planes being struck into buildings.’  Really?  Because that shit was written up decades ago.  Where the hell have you guys been?”

Audio of Condoleezza Rice at 9/11 Commission (c. 1:11:11):

Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste:  “You acknowledged that Richard Clark told you that Al-Qaeda cells were in the United States.  Did you tell the President at any time prior to August 6 of the existence of Al-Qaeda cells in the United States?

Condoleezza Rice:  “First, let me just make certain—”

RB:  “If you could just answer that question—”

CR:  “Oh, first—”

RB:  “—because I only have a very limited—”

CR:  “I understand, Commissioner.”

RB:  “Did you tell the President?”

CR:  “But it’s important that I also address—[audience applause].  It’s also important, Commissioner, that I address the, uh, the other issues that you have raised.  So, I will do it quickly, but if you’ll just give me a minute—”

RB:  “Well, my only question to you is whether you told the President—”

CR:  “I understand, Commissioner, but, well, if you’ll just give me a moment, I will address fully the questions that you’ve asked.  First of all, yes, the August 6th PDB was in response to questions of the President.  There was no recommendation that we do something about this.  The FBI was pursuing it.  I really don’t remember, Commissioner, whether I discussed this with the President.”

RB:  “Thank you.”

CR:  “I remember very well that the President was aware that there were issues inside the United States.  He talked to people about this.  But I don’t remember the Al-Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about.”

RB:  “Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice that the August 6th PDB warned against possible attacks in this country?  And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

CR:  “I believe the title was ‘bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.’  Now, the PDB—”

RB:  “Thank you.”

CR:  “No, Mr. Ben-Veniste, if you’ll—”

RB:  “I will get into the—”

CR:  “I would like to finish my point here.”

RB:  “I didn’t know there was a point.”

CR:  “Given that, you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks, I—”

RB:  “I asked you what the title was.”

CR:  “You said did it not warn of attacks.  It did not warn of attacks inside the United States.”

Audio of Bush Prior to 9/11 Commission Meeting (c. 1:13:12):

“‘Why are you and the Vice President insisting on appearing together before the 9/11 Commission?

G.W. Bush:  “Because the 9/11 Commission wants to ask us questions.  That’s why we’re meeting and I look forward to meeting with them and answering their questions.”

“I was asking, why are you appearing together, rather than separately?—which was their request.”

GWB:  “Because it’s a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 Commission is, uh, looking forward to asking us.  And I’m looking forward to answering them.  Let’s see.”

Audio of Bush 9/11 Commission Post-Mortem:

GWB:  “The Vice President and I just finished a, a, um, a good conversation with the 9-1-1 Commission.  It was wide-ranging.  It was, uh, important.  Uh.  It was, uh, i-i-i-it was just a good discussion.  And I really appreciate the Members.  Um, I-I-I really, it’s probably best if I not go into the details of the conversation.”

Mr. President, as you know, a lot of critics suggested that you wanted to appear jointly with the Vice President so that you two could keep your story straight or something.

GWB:  “Yeah.”

“Could you tell us what you think about the value of appearing together and how you would answer those critics?”

GWB:  “Yeah.  First of all, look.  I mean, if we had something to hide, we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place.  We answered all their questions and, uh, as I say, I think, I, it, I came away good about this session, uh, because I wanted them to know, eh, you know, how I set strategy, how we run the White House, how we deal with threats.  Uh, the Vice President answered a lot of there questions, answered all their questions.”

Robbie Martin :  “So that was, those clips are ridiculous.  The first time I saw those clips—”

Abby Martin:  “They’re insulting.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  The first time I ever saw those clips was, they were kind of dropped inconspicuously in the bonus features of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ with nothing explaining what they were.  They were just kind of like Conde and Bush, 9/11 CommissionAnd Michael Moore, I do think the guy believes 9/11 was an inside job.  He just doesn’t have the balls to come out and say it.

Abby Martin (c. 1:15:17):  “Yeah.  He has too much of a base he doesn’t wanna lose.”

Robbie Martin :  “I mean, the fact that he put both of these clips on the video, the clip where Bush was asked why he had to testify together instead of separate, the Conde clip, basically, and then we can’t find this clip, but there’s this great quote by Bush that it was kind of similar to those clips where he’s asked, ‘So, what about that PDB memo, why didn’t you do anything about that?’  And his response was, ‘Well, there was nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think in the prior government, they could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.

“Now, notice the careful wording of that.  He says, ‘at least’ at the beginning, so there’s an open-ended argument, ‘at least,’ and ‘I don’t think the prior government,’ meaning that there could be.  Like, he doesn’t, you know.  And he also says on such a massive scale.  So, he doesn’t just say plane attacks, period.  He says plane attacks into buildings on such a massive scale.  That almost gets him off the hook because it’s very open to interpretation because it’s clear and obvious that, in the public consciousness, we already knew about these plans for terrorists or whatever to use planes as weapons, to do attacks on this massive a scale.

The Bojinka Plot, which was apparently foiled, in the Bojinka Plot they were going to crash eight planes in mid-air, and with explosives and run one of them into the CIA building in Virginia and also kill the Pope simultaneously.  Have a guy with a suicide bomb attached to him go up to the Pope and then blow himself up.  That would have been on a much more massive scale than 9/11.  Could you imagine how the world would react to that the Pope was assassinated by Muslim terrorists?”

Abby Martin (c. 1:17:08):  “It’s insulting to my intelligence for Conde and Bush to have said that.  It really just disgusted me.”

Robbie Martin :  “Well, it’s insulting to anybody with intelligence.”

Abby Martin:  “It’s insulting to anyone who knows that, come on.  I mean, are you seriously saying that you can’t envision people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, really?  Because the front cover of the FBI’s counter-terrorism manual years before 9/11 was the World Trade Center in cross-hairs.  They knew that was a very high target.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, ‘The Lone Gunmen’ pilot, the X Files spin-off show, was about someone framing Arab Muslim terrorists to crash a plane into the World Trade Center and blame it on them and be able to go to war in the Middle East.  Tom Clancy wrote a book about terrorists using planes crashing into government buildings years before 9/11.”

Abby Martin:  “But no one in our government could imagine it.”

Robbie Martin :  “Oh, yeah, with our billion dollar government apparatus.  Yeah, you’re right.  You’re right.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:17:55):  “And it’s so funny, too, because even though it’s so blatantly untrue, people tell me that all the time, I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘Well, how could our government ever foresee that? Come on, like, you’re telling me that NORAD could ever envision that?’  Yeah.  That’s precisely what I’m telling you.  That’s precisely what I’m telling you because that’s what NORAD is for.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:18:18):  “Yeah.  And then the slightly more intelligent person will say, ‘Well, NORAD’s only for external threats coming from outside from other countries.”

Abby Martin:  “That is complete bullshit.  You don’t think that they never accounted for domestic—”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:18:32):  “Well, the problem is there’s already direct proof that they did because they were performing drills that day about fake hijackings.  So, the NORAD is directly involved in hijacking protocols, so it’s a lie to say that they don’t respond to that.  It’s a complete lie.”

Abby Martin:  “And they also had like, what, 67 interceptions the year before of wayward planes, domestically.  You’re telling me four planes were off course for, seriously, some more than an hour and we just didn’t do anything.  I mean, it’s outrageous.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, in some of the most protected airspace in the country.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:19:06):  “It’s outrageous.  Really quickly, before I move on, I just wanted to talk about the wire transfer to the head hijacker, Mohammed Atta.  The Pakistani General was in Washington, D.C. the morning of 9/11.

Robbie Martin :  “The morning of 9/11, having breakfast with Joe Biden.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:19:17):  “And this Pakistani General also wire-transferred $100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.  So, why are we having breakfast with him?

Robbie Martin (c. 1:19:27):  “Yeah.  And why—”

Abby Martin:  “It’s Mahmud Ahmed, right?”

Robbie Martin:  “—yeah, and, you know, you could say, ‘Oh, well, that’s just kind of a coincidence, again, right?  But the funny thing is Condoleezza Rice during her press conference was asked by a reporter, I think it was, from India Times—”

Abby Martin:  “Yep.”

Robbie Martin :  “He asked her, ‘Have you followed up on the hundred thousand dollars?’  He basically brought up the fact that he was having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 and why did he give a hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta.  Condoleezza Rice just like brushed it off and says, ‘Oh, well—”

Abby Martin:  “‘He wasn’t meeting with me.’”

Robbie Martin :  “—yeah.  ‘He wasn’t meeting with me.’”

Abby Martin (c. 1:20:04):  “He said, ‘Was he meeting with you or who was he meeting with?’  And she was like, ‘Well, he wasn’t meeting with me.’  And then she just moves on.  Like, wait, what?”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:20:06):  “Yeah.  But the best part of that is not the actual press conference itself, but it’s the transcript.  If you read it later, it’s redacted.  It’s redacted from the transcript that he mentions Mohammed Atta’s name, Mahmud Ahmed, or the ISI.  It’s redacted in such a way where the transcript makes it seems like it was unintelligible what he was saying.”

Abby Martin:  “I just remember something.”

Robbie Martin :  “But it’s clear what he’s saying if you watch it.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.  What’s—”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:20:30):  “They’re trying to cover it up.”

Abby Martin:  “—also interesting about the wire transfer is that the Official Report, I remember Kean and Hamilton, the Chair and Co-Chair of the Report, were asked at some press conference about the transfer, something about the money.  And they said, ‘It’s of little significance, the funding of 9/11 because it was such a little amount.  They said it took such a little amount and it was just these small incremental things that it’s just of little significance how it was funded.  It’s like, what?”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “Actually, what about the hundred-thousand-dollar wire transfer from the Pakistani General?  That’s actually pretty significant.  It’s just funny how they glossed over it and said that the way that it was financed doesn’t matter, that it’s not important.  Why, ‘cos it would unravel the whole thing?”


Robbie Martin (c. 1:22:07):  “It’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around the relationship we have in Pakistan, especially after all this WikiLeaks stuff comes out because it’s like, well, wait a second; why are we in bed with Pakistan and still giving them so much money when they are directly funnelling money into these so-called insurgents and terrorists that are fighting us in Afghanistan?  But that’s how things work.  People don’t understand that it’s not like a black and white, like, you know, we need to win this war.  It’s just a money vacuum.  You know?”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin :  “Not only is there a market for warfare and selling weapons and buying weapons.  There’s also a market for paying off people.  I was just listening to some war reporter who spent like five years in Afghanistan, covering Afghanistan, and he basically says that the economy over there right now is run by money from the CIA given to warlords.  It makes sense to me because the CIA, the U.S. Government, they don’t care if they create terrorists and people to fight us because then it’ll just give us more of an excuse to continue this.

Abby Martin (c. 1:23:09):  “Absolutely.  It’s just the Al-Qaeda thing.  I mean, we wanted there to be, we wanted people to join Al-Qaeda.  We wanted to be able to use the lie to be like, ‘No, no, no, there’s an organisation.’”

Robbie Martin :  “M-hm.”

Abby Martin:  “And without getting too mired down in the weird inconsistencies with the actual hijacking phone calls and all that stuff on board, we just wanted to mention really quickly Barbara Olson.  She supposedly called her husband, Ted Olsen, who worked at the Pentagon.  And that’s really the only—”

Robbie Martin:  “He was Attorney General.”

Abby Martin:  “—he was the Attorney General, yeah—and that was really the only instance where we heard that there were hijackings was her phone call.”

Robbie Martin :  “Or that there were, how the hijackings took place.  Most of the official narrative about how the hijackings occurred comes from her account, which is a second-hand account, which in court would be hearsay evidence.  It wouldn’t be admissible.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:24:01):  “And what’s also funny is that the first account is that she called from an AirFone.”

Robbie Martin :  “An AirFone and she called from it collect.”

Abby Martin:  “That she called her husband collect from the AirFone telling him these things—”

Robbie Martin :  “Which is technically impossible because you need to scan a credit card down the side of an AirFone to even get it to activate.”

Abby Martin:  “And later it came out that there were no AirFones on any of the planes.

Robbie Martin :  “M-hm.  Somebody did a Freedom of Information Request on the exact plane number, the flight number, and found blueprints and found the most up-to-date information on the plane—and 100% proven that there were no AirFones on the plane.  Ted Olson changed his story after that saying that they were from a cell phone.”

Abby Martin:  “You know, people have gotten too mired in the whole cell phone thing.  And I don’t really know what to think.  But all I do know, I’ve flown a lot and, cell phones have never worked.  I will always check my cell phone.  I’ve had numerous different cell phone carriers.  Every time you are above 20,000 feet in the air, cell phones don’t work.  Sorry, they don’t.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:25:04):  “And what’s funny to me is a lot of people will say, ‘Well, they were flying really low.  No, they weren’t.”

Abby Martin:  “No, they weren’t.”

Robbie Martin:  “They weren’t flying that low.”

Abby Martin:  “And even if you were flying low, if you were flying at, let’s say you were flying at 15,000 feet, the cell phone towers would be picking in and out.  It would be like, ‘Boom, boom, boom.’  You would get service and then you wouldn’t.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.  And let’s just say maybe one phone call for a split second would make sense, but there was like—”

Abby Martin:  “But they would drop immediately.”

Robbie Martin :  “—supposedly, like 15 cell phone calls.”

Abby Martin:  “That’s the weirdest part to me.  And we’re not even really gonna get into this ‘cos we don’t know.  And that’s the most important thing.  It’s not our job to explain how these calls were made or if they were made.  All we know is that what they are telling us about them isn’t true.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:25:39):  “And what I find interesting is that that evidence is so heavily relied upon to form this official narrative, when in a court of law or to a scientific mind, they don’t hold up to scrutiny very well because it’s the kind of evidence, which is delivered from people who are experiencing trauma, supposedly, over the phone, second-hand information.  We’re hearing about what they said through the relatives who spoke to these people.  That’s not that credible of evidence.  There are a lot of problems with that.  People could have false memories.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:26:10):  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:26:10):  “Our friend Steven is an expert on false memories or distorted memories of the event.  The official story was shaped very quickly in the public narrative.  That could have influenced the way they described these phone calls that they heard.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:26:23):  “One more coincidence really quickly is that Rumsfeld changed the shoot-down order into his own name.  He changed the chain of command.  So, he could only, he was like the top of the chain of command to say whether or not planes could be shot down.  This was like months before 9/11.  So, that’s just another coincidence.  I wonder how any of that happened.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:26:42):  “Yeah.  And then in Bush’s new book , he let something slip that for almost a whole day, for almost a 12-hour period, he thought that Flight 93 had been shot down because in his mind that was the protocol.  So, he just assumed when he heard it crashed, that it had been shot down ‘cos he authorised it.”

Abby Martin:  “And let’s briefly talk about Flight 93.  Flight 93 is such a bizarre case because if you’re looking at the Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, the fact that we staged the whole covering-Saddam’s-face-in-Iraq thing, I mean, all these PR stunts that we propagate and prop up, if you are looking at Flight 93, it’s the most disgusting one.  The ‘let’s roll,’ it says that that guy Mark Bingham took over the hijackers and crashed the plane heroically and the last thing he said was, ‘Let’s roll.’  And they made that whole movie out of it.  That was like the pinnacle of American, he was like the hero of 9/11.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:27:43):  “So, we were getting the evidence from a traumatised mother who copyrighted the phrase let’s roll within a week after 9/11.  So, I’m not really questioning her moral character, but I am questioning her credibility because that is absurd.  To copyright the catch-phrase that you’re dying son made, that’s—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, who is thinking about copyrighting that?

Robbie Martin :  “So, she’s trying to financially capitalise on her sons death—”

Abby Martin:  “Immediately.”

Robbie Martin :  “—immediately—that’s very suspicious and very, I think, that’s very disgusting.  But also Cheney was one of the first people to plant these seeds in the media of this being some sort of passenger take-over and rebellion.  He said something like, ‘Well, we can only assume that the passengers were very heroic that day and didn’t want the—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  And if people don’t really know about Flight 93, it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  It was supposedly going to the Capital Building or the White House.  We don’t really know where it was going.”

Robbie Martin:  “Originally, on the day of 9/11, it said it was going to Camp David or something, which is weird.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, there was a lot of weird accounts, but anyways, so, it crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, supposedly.  But what’s really odd, if you look at any picture of a plane crash ever in the history of the world you won’t just see a black hole.  You’ll see a fucking plane.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “Planes crash and it leaves debris.”

Robbie Martin :  “I mean, you’ll see at least, you’ll see a giant fuselage or a wing or the nose.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:29:04):  “Even when planes crash in the ocean, they recover almost every part of it. This plane crash, however, was basically the debris field was like miles.  It just seems really odd.  If the plane really crashed, how did debris get like three miles away?  Which just, to me, it shows more evidence that it was, in fact, blown up mid-air.  I mean it would make sense to me that NORAD in the midst of the confusion that day would accidentally, just, do what they were supposed to do and actually shoot one of the planes down.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:29:36):  “And what’s also interesting to me is when I was a kid growing up and when forensic investigations were starting to kind of catch on with the public consciousness, that people found them entertaining with things like ‘The X-Files.’  And now we have ‘C.S.I.’  But way before that I remember when a plane would crash or when it would crash mysteriously, they would rebuild the plane from the broken pieces in a hangar.

“They did this with TWA 800, the flight that mysteriously blew up.  I think it was over the Atlantic Ocean.  And they rebuilt almost the entire plane.  I remember there was an ‘X-Files’ episode that was kind of about TWA 800 and it showed them rebuilding the plane.  This is a common thing that they do in forensic investigations where they don’t know what happened and they wanna find out how the plane crashed.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:30:24):  “It’s so funny to hear the news reports from that day, too.  People are like, ‘There’s nothing here, but a whole in the ground.’  Everyone’s walking around aimlessly in hazmat suits.  They’re just, like, trying to find debris.  It’s just like a really bizarre scene if you look at the footage.”

Robbie Martin :  “And this is another thing that irritates me that people do is another form of them wanting you to close the circle for them and hand to them, from beginning to end, the complete narrative that makes sense to them, is they will ask you, ‘Well, where did all the people go? If you think it was shot down, where did all the people go? What happened to them?’  It’s like, ‘I don’t know.’  They’re probably dead, but they’re not hiding out somewhere in some South American, you know, Nazi hideout.  They’re dead.  I don’t know exactly what happened to them.  I don’t know if the plane was shot down with them in it.  I just know that they’re dead.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:31:11):  “All I know is that it doesn’t make sense.  That’s all I know is that nothing makes sense.  I’m sorry.  But I’m not satisfied with an explanation that just doesn’t add up.  I’m not satisfied with that.”

Robbie Martin :  “No.  As we’ve been going through this, every single aspect of 9/11, Flight 93, the Pentagon, the Towers falling, the lead up to it, the investigation, how the hijackers got on the planes, all these things have problems, they don’t make sense.  Individually, they don’t make sense.  So, we add them together.  It really does seem like some crazy, completely unbelievable, fairy tale.”

Abby Martin:  “It does.  And it is.”

Robbie Martin :  “It absolutely is.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:31:54):  “So, we talked about Flight 93.  We talked about a bunch of stuff leading up, warnings, etcetera.  We just wanted to talk really briefly about the Pentagon.  That’s what we talked about earlier in the show about what piqued our interest.  And for a long time I thought, ‘Oh, my god, it couldn’t have been a plane that hit the Pentagon. It looks like a missile. There’s no wing penetration to the building.

“There were so many different reports.  Some people saw a plane.  Some people didn’t see a plane.  And to me it doesn’t even matter.  I mean, I don’t know.  And I’m not gonna claim to know.  All I know is the Pentagon thing doesn’t make sense.  If it was a plane that hit the Pentagon, it must not have been the passenger plane that they told us because they would show us the video of it.  It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t show us it.”

Robbie Martin :  “Yeah, the most secure military building in the world, you’re telling me they don’t even half video frame-rate cameras going, like15-frame-a-second at least?”

Abby Martin (c. 1:32:43):  “Yeah, what are we spending trillions of dollars a year on, if we can’t even set up proper security system at the Pentagon?”

Robbie Martin:  “I mean, the footage they released is, literally, one frame a second, like webcam technology.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, it’s worse than a webcam.”

Robbie Martin :  “It’s from like 1995.  The fact that they expect us to be that gullible and to think that that’s the only footage that exists is absurd.  And then, secondly, to me the most convincing thing about the Pentagon being peculiar is that there was no evacuation order issued when Cheney and several other people knew of the impending plane coming towards the Pentagon.

‘Sir, the plane is 15 miles out.’

“Someone who worked, I think, it was for the Transportation Security Administration, Norman Mineta witnessed this conversation between Cheney—”

Abby Martin:  “They were in like a little bunker.”

Robbie Martin:  “—yeah, and the guy was telling Cheney, ‘The plane is 10 miles out.  Do the orders still stand?’  And Cheney whipped his neck around furiously and said, ‘Of course the orders still stand!  Have you heard anything to the contrary?!’  Now, the fact that the plane actually ended up hitting the Pentagon can only mean one thing.  What orders is he talking about?”

Abby Martin:  “The order to not shoot it down.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:33:43):  “He’s talking about the order to prevent from shooting the plane down or to do anything to stop it.  This was a military building where, I think, 70 people died in the attack on the Pentagon.  Why wasn’t an evacuation order issued by Cheney?  Why didn’t he throw that down the chain of command and say, ‘Get everybody out of the Pentagon immediately.  There’s a plane coming towards it right now.’’

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  April Gallop, one of the women who worked in the Pentagon, her and her kid were there and they almost died.  They’re really lucky to be alive.  But she said that there was absolutely no warning at all.  It was just sitting there in her desk and then the next second it was an explosion and they were all lying under piles of debris.”

Robbie Martin:  “Now, I’m curious, were they even told about the World Trade Center attacks?  Were the employees even given an announcement?  ‘World Trade Centers have been hit. Everybody go to your TV.’  Or were they just left completely in the dark.’”

Abby Martin:  “No, they were totally in the dark.

Robbie Martin:  “Were the Pentagon employees just sitting in the offices and all of a sudden a plane just flies in and takes ‘em out?”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  It goes to show you, once again, they do not give a shit about human life.  Even their own Pentagon employees.  They wanted to kill people.  They wanted to maximise the death rate that day, really bad.

Robbie Martin:  “And I think that that goes along with Webster Tarpley’s theory that they wanted to also scare the intelligence and military and government establishment as well.  It wasn’t just to scare the public because there were many innocent people that died in the Pentagon.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.”

Robbie Martin:  “The people who worked at the Pentagon were probably terrified to go back to work.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:35:05):  “You know, there’s a whole organisation called Pilots for 9/11 Truth.  And a lot of people say that the simple manoeuvre of flying into the Pentagon, the lawn totally unscathed.  And it flew in like, what, five feet above the lawn.  And you’re telling me a giant jumbo jet didn’t scathe the lawn or do any damage like that?  And it just had like this perfect hole in the building.  But a whole flight school, actually, tried to simulate the flight path.  And like only one person could was able to do it out of like very trained pilots.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  They were using their very highly expensive flight simulator systems with a virtual cockpit.  And they let the students kind of take turns trying to hit the plane into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.  And I think after a like hundred tries, one person hit one of the Towers.  Some of ‘em were instructors.”

Abby Martin:  “It just what’s interesting about this simulation and the fact that a lot of experienced pilots weren’t able to hit the Pentagon in precisely the way that it was hit because just knowing that we had the technology to fly planes remote control over 50 years ago.  If we had this technology and were actually drafting documents proposing false flag terrorism, then it’s really not too much of a stretch to imagine that we used some sort of remote control technology.  I mean, this is complete speculation on my part, I’m just saying that’s—”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all.”

Abby Martin:  “It’s not far-fetched.”

Robbie Martin:  “I really don’t think it is.  I mean, sure, people can say that’s crazy to believe that commercial airliners were remote-controlled on 9/11.  But, yeah, again, in the ‘60s they had it on paper that they had this technology and they were, potentially, planning on using it back then.

Abby Martin (c. 1:36:44):  “And just something that people say all the time is just like, ‘Oh, well, our government wouldn’t do this to us.’  Like, ‘they would’ve messed up or like they couldn’t have executed it so perfectly.’  It’s like, actually, they fucked up like a hundred times, everything that we’re talking about.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:36:59):  “Yeah.  They did such a sloppy job that it could only mean one thing that their egos are so huge it’s going to be—”

Abby Martin:  “A lie so big, it’s easier to believe it, just like Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist.  I mean, this event was so catastrophic and it was like these iconic buildings falling into dust, our most heavily secured building being able to be hit.  It was like such a vulnerable state.  And everyone was glued to their televisions for a month just totally being brainwashed.  It was the perfect psychological operation on the American people and the world.  And it’s so funny when people say, ‘Oh, they would’ve messed up. They couldn’t have executed this.’  Like, first of all they did fuck up a lot.  And that’s exactly what we’re going over.

“On the other hand, what they did well was what we are good at.  We have the strongest military might in the world.  And this was a highly professional military operation that was executed pretty well.  We’re really good at blowing shit up.

Robbie Martin:  “M-hm.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:37:54):  “We’re really good at using military weapons.  That’s what we do.  That’s our main export.  That’s what we produce here.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  Also our media is really good at making the most flashy emotional news coverage ever.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin:  “I mean, it really was a perfect hand-in-glove operation.

“I think one of the other interesting things about the Pentagon attack for me is that the ‘plane’ ended up hitting the section that was being refortified.  Of all the sections of the Pentagon, it hit the one that was under construction.  Freedom of Information requests, I think it was somebody from Pilots for 9/11 Truth wanted to get the flight data path recorder from the FAA or something to actually show where the flight went when it hit the Pentagon.  So they sent them a rendered movie file of the flight path and the actual flight on the recorded flight path, it doesn’t even go towards the Pentagon.  It’s going around the Pentagon and then just flies past it.

“So, that’s the official computer record of the plane.  So, something’s weird there.  It doesn’t add up.  You know?  Anytime you get a new piece of evidence to try to, like they said, ‘We’re gonna release a new Pentagon video and you are like all excited and when you see it you’re like what?  It’s like from four feet, like slightly different angle than the previous one we saw.  And it’s completely indiscernable.  It looks like a little piece of smoke.  Like flying towards the—”

Abby Martin:  “And people have said this before and I’ll say it again, if that plane did hit the Pentagon, show us it.  I mean, just show it to us.  And then it could be over.  We won’t talk about the Pentagon anymore.”

Robbie Martin:  “Or what about that, I mean, why didn’t they rebuild that plane?  Why didn’t they reconstruct that?  I mean, they, probably ‘cos it wasn’t a plane.

Abby Martin (c. 1:39:31):  “Yeah, it’s just like.”

Robbie Martin:  “Or I don’t know what it was, but it’s suspicious.”

Abby Martin:  “Show us whatever hit the Pentagon.  Just show us.  If there’s nothing to hide, then why are you hiding everything?

“And we talked briefly about the 9/11 Commission before about how Kissinger was the original head of it.  But we wanted to talk about how the Bush Administration completely stonewalled the investigation, which is totally unheard of.  Days, you know, after every national disaster, Pearl Harbour, JFK, an investigation was immediately ensued.  I mean, that’s just like protocol.

“The fact that the 9/11 Commission was stonewalled for over a year, and it was actually like forced into effect by the widows of people who died there, even when the Commission was being formed the key players that they wanted to put in it is just insulting—Kissinger.  And then Kissinger was later replaced by Zelikow, co-author of a book by Condoleezza Rice and also the person who penned the controversial Bush Doctrine.  I mean, this guy is disgusting.  He is a warmonger.”

Robbie Martin:  “Even the supposed liberals and the people who are like on our side of 9/11, ‘cos like Ben Batista, he represented Boeing and all these other airline companies.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.

Robbie Martin:  “So, there’s a huge conflict of interest, just even on that level that someone who was working as a PR representative for an airline industry gets to be on the 9/11 Commission where it’s all about ways to review how the airlines need to improve their security.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin:  “I mean, that’s ridiculous.  And then, also, Max Cleland, a remnant of the kind of post-Vietnam War era of the U.S. Government, when people like John Kerry and him were very well-respected.  They were veterans that spoke heavily against the wars.  He left the 9/11 Commisison before it even started because he realised and he openly said that it was a cover up, that he left in protest.

Abby Martin (c. 1:41:11):  “And now we see Colonel Anthony Schaffer coming out, saying, agreeing with that statement, saying that he talked to every Commission Member and they all said that they were covering up for someone and something.

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “Like at every level of the Commission, it was all covered up.  And Zelikow was totally in control what information was even going to the Commissioners.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  What’s his name?  Lee Hamilton and what’s the other guy?”

Abby Martin (c. 1:41:32):  “Kean.”

Robbie Martin:  “Kean.  Both of them have admitted on several occasions that the 9/11 Commission was a cover-up, that NORAD lied to them, that the Bush Administration lied to them.

Abby Martin:  “That ‘they were set up to fail,’ that’s a quote.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, they even said that, yeah, they were set up to fail.  There’s just so much you can cover on the 9/11 Commission alone.”

Abby Martin:  “And I love one of my favourite books from Dr. Griffin is The 9/11 Omission.  It’s just like the biggest case of just a complete lie of omission.  I mean, everything that is damaging about 9/11 was just simply omitted.

Robbie Martin:  “What’s very interesting is people, conspiracy theorists, the two main commission names you always hear about are 9/11 Commission and Warren Commission.  They kind of compare the two together, that they were both huge cover-ups.  You know?  Even one of the guys who was on the 9/11 Commission was on the Warren Commission, Lee Hamilton.  Both of these commissions were equally designed to be cover-ups.  However, the Warren Commission, a commission that investigated death of one person, is ten times more comprehensive than the 9/11 Commission Report.  It actually seems they were trying to make people feel like they were doing a real investigation.

“Whereas, the 9/11 Investigation Report, the 9/11 Commission’s Report, it seriously is the most lightweight, filled with no information, no facts.  It is incredibly under-whelming.  Even just to find out about what happened on 9/11.  I mean it’s ridiculous.  The Warren Commission, it’s like a hardcore book you would dread reading in high school, if you were given it for some class ‘cos it is so in-depth.”

Abby Martin:  “The biggest lie of omission from the 9/11 Commission was just the fact that they did not include any testimony of explosives going off, which, I mean, hundreds of people testified before the 9/11 Commission saying that there were explosives—emergency responders, fire-fighters, civilians, workers, most notably, William Rodriguez.  He was a janitor in the World Trade Center for 20 years.  He had a little key that he would go up in the stairwells.  He had been working there for a long time.  He was in the subbasement level and heard explosions, felt explosions.  And they shook him, literally.  They shook the ground he was standing on.  This was before the planes hit.

Robbie Martin (c. 1:43:44):  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “Before the planes hit he felt explosions.”

Robbie Martin:  “To me, one of the most suspicious things about him, you know, you could argue semi-convincingly that maybe he was hearing some kind of other, like the building giving way or something that sounded like an explosion.  I could see someone maybe saying he heard things wrong or whatever.  But to me one of the most interesting thing about William Rodriguez is he was considered like a 9/11 hero.”

Abby Martin:  “Oh, yeah.”

Robbie Martin:  “And months after 9/11 he had the key, the master key, the janitor key that unlocked—”

Abby Martin:  “He was the last survivor pulled out.”

Robbie Martin:  “—last survivor; and there’s pictures of him with George W. Bush.”

Abby Martin:  “And he didn’t even question, really, he didn’t question anything at all until he realised that his testimony was being omitted.”

Robbie Martin:  “But it wasn’t that his testimony was being omitted, that was kind of the final straw for him.”

Abby Martin:  “The media changed the story.”

Robbie Martin:  “It was that when he watched his interviews on TV after he would record them, he realised that they had carefully edited out everything he mentioned about explosions, bombs going off.”

Abby Martin:  “Right.”

Robbie Martin:  “That would send red flags, I mean, if I was the person who got out of there, I’d be like, ‘What in the hell are they doing?!”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  Why are you covering up a giant aspect of this story?”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:44:46):  “Yeah, it’s very curious.”

Abby Martin:  “And, now, just to give you a quick update on what William Rodriguez is doing, he’s just touring the world trying to spread this information.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “He’s trying to tell people the truth about 9/11.  He’s like, he’s such an awesome person.  I had the pleasure of meeting him.  And he’s just like the most genuine person.  I mean, he just has such a good heart.  Now, he’s just totally harassed by the CIA, the government.  He went to Venezuela, I remember, and he said there were like spies there.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, ‘cos he went to deliver the information to Hugo Chavez.

Abby Martin:  “It’s really crazy.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, it’s very interesting.”

Abby Martin:  “He, actually, like, saved numerous lives that day.  He kept going back into the buildings and pulling out bodies and the building ended up collapsing on top of him.  He’s very lucky to be alive.  He was the last survivor pulled out.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, it’s a pretty incredible story.”

Abby Martin:  “And let’s talk, now that we’ve just mentioned the explosives and this is pretty much the most controversial aspect of the 9/11 Truth Movement.  It turns a lot of people off.  It shuts a lot of people off to the other aspects of 9/11 that were glaringly facilitated by elements within our own government is the controlled demolition hypothesis that the World Trade Centers were blown up by explosives.

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  Or that they were aided by some kind of incendiary or device to collapse in the way that they did.

Abby Martin:  “Should we start with Building 7?

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  I think we should start by talking about Building 7 because that one is off the bat.  You show that to anyone who has a skeptical mind and they will watch it and say, ‘Wow, this really looks like controlled demolition.’”

Abby Martin:  “Building 7 was the third tower that eventually fell on 9/11.  It was more than a football field away from the first two towers.  It was called the Salomon Brothers Building.  It was 47 stories high.  Like we said before it contained highly secure offices and government agencies, including Giuliani’s secret bunker.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  It was hit by some debris from the World Trade Center, but not a significant amount, not enough to weaken the structure.  And it also had, I’d say, moderate fires, not on every floor.  I think the 9/11 Truth Movement sometimes—”

Abby Martin:  “Cherry-picks the photos?”

Robbie Martin:  “Not cherry-picks it, but sometimes they downplay things to make their case.  And they don’t have to.  I mean, just to say there was literally no fire in the building is a lie.  Because there was.  There was a pretty big fire in it.  But it doesn’t make the case that it fell from fire any stronger because it’s not possible.  It’s not physically possible for a building to fall, a steel structure building to fall from fire alone.”

Abby Martin:  “There’s been raging infernos on numerous instances all around the world and never once has a high-rise steel-framed structure fallen due to an, and these buildings were like engulfed in infernos for hours and hours.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, giant skyscrapers.  They were, like, much bigger than the World Trade Center.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  Building 7 fell; I don’t even want to say it fell, it was blown up at 5:20pm on the day of 9/11.  Really, really bizarre and I didn’t know about this until years and years and years later.  And a lot of people have no idea that there was a third building that fell.  And for a long time I would show people.  ‘Did you know that this building fell?’

“It’s just so weird how it’s just totally unmentioned.  The 9/11 Commission Report didn’t even mention Building 7.  It was like this gigantic structural failure that should be like, we should all be really evaluating the way buildings are built.  That this building could fall like this, then we should all be seriously stopping and, ‘Hold on. Do not build anymore buildings. We need to really re-evaluate what we’re doing.”

Robbie Martin:  “That, to me, was one of the most peculiar things.  Before I really got myself mentally to the position where I was open to believing that they put bombs in the buildings, I would think things like wait a second if these buildings all fell from fire, shouldn’t we be re-writing architectural designs worldwide in architectural conferences saying, well, here we’ll need to redesign skyscrapers from now on?  They all have this dangerous flaw built in them.  It’s very, very odd to me.”

Abby Martin:  “I encourage everyone to go online; go to WTC7.net.  And just check out some videos of the building collapsing ‘cos it’s extremely obvious that it’s demolished.  Everyone agrees with this.  International experts in demolition will look at it.  You can see their first reaction.  They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s perfect controlled demolition.  It’s a beautiful job.’  Then you’re like ‘Oh, that was on 9/11.’  And they’re like, ‘What?!’  You could just see like people’s reactions.  I mean, it’s so glaringly obvious that this Building was blown up.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:49:28):  “And a lot of these people who have done reports on why Building 7 fell and why it fell on its own, they’re on the payroll for certain companies.  I mean they’re not writing these independently.  They’re not just independent debunkers who are coming out of the woodwork who are flexing their structural engineering muscles.  These are like paid-for papers.  And I think that a lot of people argue, ‘Well, why aren’t there more structural engineers who are saying that the buildings fell from controlled demolition.  Well, there are a lot of structural engineers saying that.”

Abby Martin:  “There’s over 1,200.  Not 1,200 strictly structural engineers, but building professionals.”

Robbie Martin:  “But people can cherry-pick on the other side, too.  They’ll just be able to discredit all those people by saying, ‘Well, they wanna get like popular or the 9/11—”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah, it’s really nice to put your whole career and life on the line and say that they have totally demonised in your industry in the public eye.  That makes a lot of sense.”

Robbie Martin:  “I have a lot of arguments with some of my friends.  One of them, in particular, whenever we talk about 9/11 he always gravitates toward controlled demolition because he hates any theories revolving around controlled demolition.  And like he’ll send me like a video made by some debunker called like Tricky Dick.  And it’ll be like a video of like Richard Gage you know maybe not one of his best speeches ever, making some mistakes and stuff, as if that’s designed to—”

Abby Martin:  “Poisoning the—”

Robbie Martin:  “As if that’s gonna have any effect on my belief, or most people’s belief, that Building 7 was imploded by controlled demolition.  That’s the logical fallacy of going after the messenger instead of the actual content or the message.”

Abby Martin:  “And we’re not even talking about the two towers.  We’re just talking about Building 7.”

Robbie Martin:  “I could talk about the two towers, but I’d rather talk about Building 7 because it’s way more obvious that it was blown up by controlled demolition.”

Abby Martin:  “People will always say, ‘Well, I saw a plane hit it. Like, didn’t you? What do you mean it was blown up?’  You’re like, ‘First of all, I’m not talking about the Two Towers.  I’m talking about another building that was one of the highest buildings, let’s say, in Oakland; it would be one of the highest buildings in Downtown Oakland.  And if it just imploded one day, I think I would be really shocked.  This is all speculation, but it was done in such a visible way.  It was done in broad daylight, 5:20pm.  The dust was settling a little bit from the collapses.  I honestly think that it was meant to be blown up while the dust cloud from the two buildings fell.  And that’s another reason why they effed up.”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin:  “They messed up big time with Building 7.  That’s like the smoking gun.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:52:15):  “Yeah, I agree.  And I don’t know why.  I can’t speculate why they blew up Building 7.  I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that there was like paperwork in there or anything because let’s look at it realistically.  Blowing up a building to destroy paperwork is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of.  Have you seen footage from the ground at World Trade Center after the plane had hit it?  It looks like it’s snowing paperwork.  I mean, there’s just papers flying all over the street.  It’s absurd to think that they blew up the buildings to take care of those papers.  They could have just used a shredder truck.  They didn’t have to do that.

“I think it’s more likely that there was the emergency command bunker doing the terrorism drill tripod from Building 7 and it was far too suspicious to keep that available afterwards.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:53:00):  “Yeah, I agree.  I mean, we already know that there was a command centre there.  That’s already on record.  So, it would make sense to me that there was some sort of chain of command about 9/11 happening, whether or not it was with the buildings or not or NORAD or something.  It’s definitely really suspicious.  If you look at the footprint of Building 7 after it quote-unquote falls, it’s very shocking to see that there’s absolutely nothing there.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:53:26):  “I know it looks like a bunch of paper, just, like cardboard house just fell.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:53:30):  “It’s like where the hell did this building go.  The building falls.  It doesn’t disappear.  And one really interesting thing is that the BBC and CNN actually reported Building 7, the Solomon Brothers Building, falling 20 minutes and also hours before it actually fell.  So, you have to ask yourself.  Why on Earth did we ever think that this building would just randomly fall when never before in the history the world has a steel-framed building fallen in that way?  Why the hell would they report that it had already fallen?  That’s really suspicious.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:54:03):  “I mean, yeah, you could argue, debunker, I’m gonna play devil’s advocate for a second that they would, you know, that they, the two towers already fell.  And then the next one that was already in flames.  They just assumed that one was gonna fall, too.  However, that doesn’t explain why the media wire service reported that it did fall because that’s pretty, I mean, that, I don’t know.  That’s very interesting.  She’s talking about how it’s already fallen while she’s standing in front of it.

Abby Martin (c. 1:54:32):  “And then you see fire-fighters outside of Building 7.  They had evacuated Building 7 because it was on fire.  But these fire-fighters are outside of the building.  The building’s perfectly intact, structurally.  And you hear them going, ‘this building is about to blow up. Everyone get back. The building’s about to blow up. This building will be coming down soon.’  So, I don’t know.  You know, it’s hard to speculate what exactly the motive was or why this happened.  All we know is that it happened.  We know that Building 7 was blown up.  We don’t know why.  And it’s very obvious.  I mean someone knew that day.  These fire-fighters knew that it was gonna be demolished.

“Another really interesting thing, Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder for Building 7 and the two Towers raked in billions of dollars, raked it in.  And now he’s wanting more money.  Did you know that?  He’s like requiring more taxpayer money to rebuild Building 7—scumbag.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:55:33):  “It’s pretty ridiculous.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:55:35):  “We really don’t wanna focus too much on our personal theories.  But we definitely subscribe to the theory that we do think the Twin Towers were demolished as well.  It’s only so much of a stretch to comprehend the fact that there was a 47-story building blown up in broad daylight because that would mean that there would have to be some sort of pre-planted explosives and foreknowledge of the fact that this was gonna happen and the planting of these explosives the planning of bringing this building down.  If you can wrap your mind around that, then it’s really not too far of a stretch of the imagination to at least question the possibility that the World Trade Center Towers were brought down as well.  And this is all speculation.  I have no idea who brought down the Towers.  I have no idea how they brought down the Towers.  We have some sort of idea.  They have found thermitic material.  Four different people on the day of 9/11 collected the dust after the buildings were brought down.  And they sent it to a physicist from BYU and he tested it and found active thermitic material, highly energetic.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:56:51):  “Yeah.  That’s still incendiary, even in the dust.  They’ve lit pieces of these little, tiny—”

Abby Martin (c. 1:56:55):  “And it explodes.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:56:57):  “Yeah and they incinerate.  So, you can’t discount that they found that in the dust.  If you want to try to debunk that, you have to actually question other things.  Like, well who, what’s the chain of custody with the dust.  Where’d they get the dust from?  But the fact that it was found in the dust that Steven Jones has, you would basically have to say that he put it there.  You can’t debunk it by saying that it’s something else he’s finding.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:57:27):  “And it’s been peer-reviewed.  It’s been published in a scientific journal.  So, now it’s not even up for debate.  Everyone should be demanding that we work backwards just like a crime scene.  We now have evidence, hard evidence, that’s been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal that there was active thermitic material, found, that is incendiary.”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:57:44):  “Yeah, that there was incendiary chemical that shouldn’t be found in building debris.  That alone, I don’t even think it’s necessary to try to, I mean, I just think that alone is enough to—”

Abby Martin (c. 1:57:57):  “Re-open investigation about the buildings collapsing?”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:57:59):  “Yeah.”

Abby Martin (c. 1:58:01):  “And we’re just gonna go through extremely basic facts why we question the official story about the building collapses.  One is the fact that they fell at near freefall speeds.

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah, and I think saying that they fell, literally, at freefall speed is a slight exaggeration.  They did not.  They fell slightly slower than freefall speed.  But they still fell way faster than they should have.  And also debunkers will say, ‘Well, the ‘pile driver,’ the weight of the quote ‘pile driver,’ of the upper floors pushing down on the lower floors caused it to cascade and collapse at an extremely high rate, except there’s a flaw with that theory.  You actually have to imagine and speculate.  You have to speculate that there is a ‘pile driver’ there because you don’t see one.  A cloud of dust is enveloping the bottom floor of the building.  It’s not a solid block that you can actually see with your eyes.  If anything, to me, it looks like a cloud of debris falling down.  I don’t see anything that resembles a solid pile driver-like effect happening whatsoever.  But there will be debunkers who will use their own speculation and go out on a limb and say, ‘Well, there’s clearly a pile driver there.’”

Abby Martin (c. 1:59:12):  “‘There has to be.’”

Robbie Martin (c. 1:59:13):  “They use kind of their speculative abilities, speculative leap and say, ‘Well, there had to be a pile driver to cause it to crush the lower floors,’ where you can’t actually visibly see one.  So, it’s interesting the way the debunkers have to resort to speculation to hold up their own theories.”

Abby Martin:  “Well, what’s interesting is let’s say there was a pile driver.”

Robbie Martin:  “Okay.”

Abby Martin:  “Let’s just speculate that there was and agree with the debunkers.  So, these buildings, two tallest buildings at the time the architect of the buildings, a Japanese guy, said that they were built to withstand numerous jet blows.  And then Frank DeMartini, the construction manager, said that the buildings were built like the mesh grid, like the mesh screen on you front door.  That’s how intense the steel grid was.  He said a plane hitting it would simply be like sticking a pencil through one of the tiny holes on a screen door.  So, let’s say that there was a pile driver.  These buildings were built specifically to hold up the weight of the buildings.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:00:14):  “Well, they were the tallest buildings at the time.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:00:17):  “Right.  The bottom third of these two structures were meant to hold up twice their weight.  That’s what they’d always done.  So, you’re telling me that even if there were a pile driver, how on Earth did it crush something, like, that was designed to hold up twice its weight and obliterate it into fine powder?”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:00:36):  “I could maybe see something like a few floors collapsing in on themselves.

“Another thing I’ve noticed debunkers do when referring to the Twin Towers is in the same way a little bit over-zealous 9/11 Truthers say that the Towers absolutely fell at exactly freefall speed, one of my friends, who kind of debunks the controlled demolition stuff, he kind of falls almost on the complete other speculative end by saying that the buildings took like 15 seconds to fall because what he’s doing is he’s watching the dust cloud settle.  And he’s kind of using his own imagination to imagine that the buildings are still standing behind there and they haven’t fallen yet until you literally see nothing there.  My problem with that is you can see the rate of speed, at which they’re falling.  So, I just mentally assume, and visually by watching, that they keep continually falling at that same rate.”

Abby Martin:  “That’s called grasping at straws.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:01:31):  “Well, it is.  It is.  I do think it’s a little bit of going out on a limb.  He claims he’s very skeptically-minded, though, but I do think he tends to resort to speculation himself to prove his own theories.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.  The official story is that the floors pancaked onto each other.  Okay, let’s think about that—a pancake collapse.  That means that the floors, first of all, the floors would have to, the steel columns, the intricate steel columns in the middle of each acre-floor surrounded by a mesh steel grid.  Let’s say that they all failed simultaneously, all at once.  Okay?  That the fire had just weakened all of them at once and they all just collapsed.  Okay.  So, a floor hitting another floor, let’s say that takes one second.  How tall were the buildings, 110 stories?  You’re telling me that the floors fell onto each other, one floor at a time, crushing the ones below and it took ten seconds?

Robbie Martin (c. 2:02:27):  “Yeah, I mean, that’s what they want you to believe.  That’s what most people seem to accept.”

Abby Martin:  “To believe the rate at which these buildings fell and the fact that they fell into the path of most resistance, the resistance that’s been designed to hold up that weight shows to me that matter would have to be removed before the falling debris, in order for that rate or the velocity of the buildings falling.  The floors would seriously, there would have to be matter removed before the falling debris in order for that velocity to have occurred.  That’s just like basic logic.  I mean just remove any emotion that you have toward this event and just seriously watch video footage of the buildings falling and tell me, first of all, if it looks like they’re exploding, second of all, how fast they fall and if they fall in a way that just doesn’t make sense.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:03:22):  “Yeah, that goes back to my initial reaction on the day of 9/11 is I thought it looked so good that it looked better than any Hollywood movie special effect I’d ever seen as far as how perfect it fell.  I mean, it was unnatural to how it fell.  This, to me, is part of the problem with controlled demolition theories is that for every claim, it’s like for every action there’s a reaction.  People can argue about this all day.  And that’s why I think it’s not even necessary to focus in on this when you wanna show someone why the 9/11 official story is completely made up.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:04:02):  “‘Cos it’s so technical and we’ve done so much research on it that I feel really comfortable talking to people about it.  But a lot of people are so, just like, ‘I’m not an expert. I’m not an architect. I’m not an engineer. I have no, like, professional perspective.’”

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  And I’m not even emotional about this when I talk about this anymore.  I probably should be because it’s so awful.”

Abby Martin:  “You can’t argue with people who are coming with emotion because it’s never gonna be on the same level.  And if you look at pictures of Ground Zero, the steel looks like confetti.  All the steel’s, like, perfectly cut into, like, blocks ready to just be shipped to China.  It was like Ground Zero was cleaned up immediately.  The steel was just cut perfectly, just put on trucks, shipped to China.  And Ground Zero just looks like nothing.  There’s nothing there.  Where the hell did 110 stories of furniture, people, equipment, concrete, steel, where did it go?  It is completely gone.  If a building is pancaking down it would contain the contents.  They would be contained within the floors.  There’s nothing there.  You look at Ground Zero.  It’s just powder and paper.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:05:15):  “And there’s a lot of other interesting things that aren’t directly related to the controlled demolitions, but just about the buildings themselves.  For instance, Controlled Demolition, Incorporated and I think maybe it was either FEMA or Controlled Demolition, Incorporated on television the night of 9/11 they were asked by the reporter, ‘How long have you been here during the cleanup?’  And the guy admitted, ‘Oh, we’ve been here since last night because we were performing a drill.’  So, the clean-up crew already happened to be there the night before.

Abby Martin:  “What a coincidence theory.”

Robbie Martin:  “Okay, another thing is that Giuliani was supposed to use the City budget to get fire-fighters new radios that could communicate through, penetrate more thick substances, and communicate over farther distances.  He should be criminally charged with negligence for not allocating that City money to those radios because if the fire-fighters from on the ground saw one of the towers collapsing, they would have been able to radio into the other tower and say, ‘Get out of the tower immediately. The other tower has collapsed. You gotta get out of there.’  They weren’t able to do that.  They couldn’t radio the people in the tower because the radios weren’t good enough.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:06:21):  “Not to mention Christine Whitman, the head of the EPA told everyone that it was safe to breathe, even though they knew that the buildings were full of asbestos.

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  They wanted to open up Wall Street and get that gold under the World Trade Center.”

Abby Martin:  “They wanted to get us shopping and spending money.  ‘Get the gold, baby!’  Yeah, think about what it was.  It was a pulverised building full of asbestos and, like, poisonous material.”

Robbie Martin:  “And even if you believe the official story, Cheney should be charged with criminal negligence, negligent homicide, because he knew there was an attack imminent after the first Tower got hit.  He knew there was an attack on the Pentagon coming because they had gotten these warnings.  Especially, it is absolutely proven that he knew an attack on the Pentagon was coming because Norman Mineta was witness to him being told about it and he didn’t issue an evacuation order.  That’s really amoral.  All he had to do was just call and say, ‘Get out of the Pentagon. Evacuate it.’”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  It shows you that they just wanted people to die, really.  They didn’t evacuate the towers.  They didn’t evacuate the Pentagon.

“Before we move on from the Twin Towers, though, I just wanted to say really quickly, the National Institute of Standards and Technology was an official government agency that was assigned to write their report about the World Trade Center collapses.  But what’s really interesting is that they only explain up to the collapse initiation.  They do not explain the total collapse and they do not explain the speed of the collapse.  They just plug the information.  And they got their black box model explaining why the collapse was initiated and that’s it.  That’s the end of the report.”

Robbie Martin (c. 2:07:54):  “And there were also other really funny things that they did.  You can find video of them shooting off with his shotgun the fire-proofing from the columns because they wanted to try to emulate the theory that the foregone conclusion that they needed to prove in their minds, which was the plane hitting the building knocked all the fireproofing off of the columns.  So, they had to, in turn, knock off all the fireproofing on the columns themselves to get the results to even remotely resemble the end conclusion.”

Abby Martin:  “And with the shotgun they would shoot each section and be like, ‘See?  The fireproofing is coming out—”

Robbie Martin:  “But what’s funny is that the building, even the floor model that they constructed, the miniature model, didn’t even act how it was supposed to.  It did not buckle or react in the way that they wanted to at all, even after they knocked all the fireproofing off of the column.  So, there’s so many glaring flaws in that report.  And, yeah, they even came up with a new form of physics to explain how World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed after like five different variations they released.

“Now, they say that it collapsed from some sort of new phenomenon called thermal expansion, which basically creates a virtual explosion inside of a building.  They tried to describe it as almost like the building’s a bubble and it’s been filled up with energy and it has no choice but to collapse.

“I think, when it comes to the buildings, all people should really do is watch Building 7 falling.  And if they don’t find it curious or peculiar, then move on.  I mean you’re not going to be, it such an extreme thing to try to get someone to believe that if you can’t convince someone by what we’ve just talked about, then you’re probably not going to be able to convince them.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  People have a lot of emotions still about this event and you cannot argue with someone who’s arguing with emotion.”

Robbie Martin:  “It’s very hard to believe for a lot of people that the Government would have been willing to kill 3,000 of their own citizens.

Abby Martin:  “Even though we have no problems or qualms about killing millions around the world.

Robbie Martin:  “Yeah.  And I think that that shows that people are still kind of stuck under that idea that the American Government establishment is out to protect the American citizenry, which is not true at all.  I mean we’ve seen with Hurricane Katrina.  We’ve seen with so many things that have happened.  Just from the Bush and Obama Administrations that they are absolutely not.  The Obama Administration is trying to figure out ways to execute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.  It’s pretty disturbing.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:10:04):  “And I know that we’ve been speculating a little bit, as we go over all this evidence.  But a lot of people have, we’ve talked about a lot of people who try to debunk you or demand that you offer some sort of alternative or alternate hypothesis or alternate narrative that fits all the information you’re contradicting the official story with.  But what’s interesting is that immediately when you do start to speculate ‘cos it’s almost, like, demanded of you, and they pigeonhole you.  And they’re just like, ‘Well who did it? Why? What were their motives?’  It’s almost like when you start to, they’ll just be like, ‘Well, you’re speculating.’”

Robbie Martin:  “Well, they always demand that you speculate and then get mad at people who speculate.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.”

Robbie Martin:  “So, you can’t have it both ways, man.  It’s like if you’re gonna try to argue with me about 9/11, when you ask me questions that are ridiculously unknowable like that then that is speculation.  You’re asking me to speculate.”

Abby Martin:  “Exactly.  And so, yeah, it just goes back to the point that we don’t have to speculate.  All we need to do is point out the glaring inconsistencies and holes.  Yeah, we need to ask questions and demand answers.  A lot of people say, Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’  You’re like, ‘Well, okay, the simplest explanation to me would be that our Government executed a military operation to pursue goals.  That’s what they do every day.

Robbie Martin (c. 2:11:32):  “Yeah.  And to claim that the 9/11 official story fits into the Occam’s razor paradigm is laughable because it basically you have to believe in a hundred coincidences all fired like a Rube Goldberg device like all one right after another for it all to take place perfectly.  And I’m not even talking about the buildings right now.  I’m talking about just the attacks themselves, how they were carried out.  Occam’s razor does not include a ridiculous coincidence theory in it.”

Abby Martin:  “Yeah.  I mean, the simplest explanation is definitely not the official story.  How was the simplest explanation the fact that a hundred coincidences all happen simultaneously?  That’s not simple at all.  That’s actually really difficult for me to wrap my mind around.  That is way more unbelievable to me.

“And, you know, after 9/11, there’s a gigantic chilling effect we saw in the media—Bill Maher, Dan Rather talking about, you know, everyone just had to go along with things.

Robbie Martin (c. 2:12:31):  “He talks about how it was like the climate after 9/11 was like in Africa when they put like a burning tire around the neck of like a political dissenter to try to show the rest of society don’t do what he did.  And that’s what happened to several reporters and people after 9/11.  Phil Donahue was one of the most outspoken critics against our Military plans.  He was on MSNBC, the now quote-unquote ‘Liberal’ MSNBC network.  He had his own show.  And he was quickly removed from his own show because he was too controversial.  He was speaking too much truth.

Bill Maher said on ‘Politically Incorrect,’ he was, kind of, rejecting that mantra that you heard that this was the most cowardly attack ever on our country.  In his mind, he didn’t think 19 people, all willing to commit suicide was very cowardly.  It was actually pretty intense.  He was just like, ‘These people weren’t cowards. They were just really crazy.’  I think he was saying something like that, trying to make that point.  But that was too offensive for the people at ABC, so they fired him.

Abby Martin (c. 2:13:38):  “Yeah.  I mean, just think about the propaganda and like the mindfuck that was going on after 9/11.  All people need to do is look at the RNC, that montage showing the hyping up, the fear-mongering three years after the attack, still; I mean, it’s just disgusting how many times they used 9/11 and terrorism over and over again.  People don’t remember that, but I really encourage people to go back and look at some of this footage because it’s really shocking.”


Audio of G.W. Bush:  “In the heart of this great city we saw tragedy arrive on a quiet morning.

“September the 11th.

“September the 11th.

“September the 11th.

Audio of unidentified male:  “September 11th.”

Audio of unidentified male Y:  “September 11th.”

Audio of unidentified male Z:  “September 11th.”

Audio of unidentified male A:  “September 11th.”

Audio of unidentified male B:  “ “

Audio of unidentified male C: “ “

Audio of unidentified male D: “ “

Audio of unidentified male E: “ “

Audio of unidentified female:  “September 11th.”

“September the 11th.

Audio of unidentified male F: “ “

Audio of unidentified male G: “ “

Audio of unidentified male H: “ “

Audio of unidentified male I: “ “

Audio of unidentified male J: “ “

Audio of unidentified male K: “ “

Audio of unidentified male L: “ “

Audio of unidentified male M: “ “

Audio of unidentified male N: “ “

Audio of unidentified male O: “ “

Audio of unidentified male P: “ “

Audio of unidentified male Q:  “September 11th, 2001.”

“Poison gas.”

“Torture chambers.”

“Mass graves.”

“Deadly technologies.”

Audio of G.W. Bush:  “The radical ideology of hate.”

Female:  “Terror of threats.”


Bush:  “Terror.”


“War on terrorism.”

“War against terrorism.”

“Global war on terror.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”

“Global terrorism.”











“The evil terrorists.”



Robbie Martin:  “I mean they tried to bury and discredit everyone who was questioning the 9/11 official story at the time.  I think even Michael Moore, on the day of 9/11, he was saying things like, ‘there is no terrorist threat. This is not valid.’  And he quickly back-pedaled on that as time went on ‘cos I think he realised that he saw that climate happening and he realised that if he went more down that road, he was gonna be totally ruined.  So, he had to kind of walk that line.”

Abby Martin (c. 2:15:59):  “And, you know, we wanted to wrap up the show by just talking about the chilling effect how it really got penetrated into the American people and our politicians in Government was with the Anthrax attacks.  And we’re gonna actually do a second part of this show where we just go over the Anthrax Attacks and what the implications are of that and what it did to the psyche of the American people.”

Robbie Martin:  “We don’t think that 9/11 on its own was responsible for all of these after effects that have happened to America since 9/11.  It required the Anthrax Attacks to really push it over the edge because the 9/11 attacks themselves were localised.  They happened in certain areas.  It did scare pretty much everybody into wanting to fly.  That had that effect on the populace.  But what anthrax is it made everybody scared to go get their mail, which is something everybody had to do on a daily basis.  So, now any little housewife, old lady, guy who lives in the middle of nowhere in the Sierra Nevadas can be killed by a terrorist.  It was really trying to drive it home to the American people.  And that’s why we think that this is so important that we need to spend at least a whole ‘nother episode talking about anthrax.”

Abby Martin:  “Absolutely.  And I hope that you guys learned a little bit.  And I really encourage everyone to check out Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, if you wanna find out any more hard facts or look at any expert testimony about the building collapses and really get to the bare bones of that—AE911Truth.org, also, Pilots for 9/11 Truth.”

Robbie Martin:  “HistoryCommons.org, which holds the 9/11 Timeline by Paul Thompson.”

Abby Martin:  “WantToKnow.info, it’s a really good site as well.  And MediaRoots.org.  Check out MediaRoots.org.  And check out the Soundcloud timeline to go over all the resources and music played and talked about during the show.”

Robbie Martin:  “And if you want some documentation about 9/11 that you can’t find on the net, I recommend the books:  Crossing the Rubicon by Mike Ruppert9/11 Synthetic Terror by Webster Tarpley, that’s a little bit more on the speculative end, but it’s still filled with great information.  Also, Debunking 9/11 Debunking by David Griffin is great.”

Abby Martin:  “All of David Griffin’s books are excellent.  I haven’t read his new one.  But, yeah, Debunking 9/11 Debunking was definitely the most thorough, just clear cut case where he just debunks all the official reports.  And it’s just mind-blowing.

“And 9/11 is so important.  It’s so, so important because if it weren’t for 9/11, we would not be openly torturing.  We would not be openly assassinating American citizens abroad.  We would not be engaged fully in this fake, manufactured, ‘War on Terrorism.’  We wouldn’t be engaged immorally and illegally in two countries and going after other countries in the Middle East.  We would not be eradicating civil liberties.  We wouldn’t have the Homeland Security.  We wouldn’t have these agencies.   We wouldn’t be propping up our Military apparatus by the trillions.”

Robbie Martin:  “We wouldn’t have naked body scanners at airports.”

Abby Martin:  “This all goes back to 9/11.  And people just need to contextualise 9/11 and realise the impact that it had, and that it continues to have, in our country and in our world.  And that’s why we wanted to do this episode to try to shed some light and sift through this information and really go over the hard evidence.  So, thank you so much for listening, you guys.

“Definitely tune in to the episode where we go over the Anthrax case.  And don’t forget to donate to MediaRoots.org, if you wanna continue to see these broadcasts be produced.  Thank you very much.  Check out our Soundcloud timeline to go over all the facts and music.  And visit MediaRoots.org.  And thanks so much for your support, bye.”

Robbie Martin:  “Thanks for listening everybody.  Have a good one.”


Transcript by Felipe Messina

Photo by flickr user Animation Concept [refers to the image I used in the original MediaRoots.org article]

Check out our follow up episode about the Anthrax Attacks, From the Memory hole.


Also use Lumpenproletariat‘s internal search function to find other articles on 9/11, including:

  • Christopher Bollyn on 9/11 and Architects of Terror“, 9 MAR 2016


[1]  This Media Roots Radio transcript was originally published at the following URL:  http://mediaroots.org/mr-radio-transcript-911-coincidence-theory

However, for some reason, it has either been lost or obfuscated by Media Roots.  Fortunately, many other websites have cross-posted it.  DProgram.net is one website, which has archived my transcript in its entirety on Tuesday, February 14, 2012.  The actual podcast was from months earlier.  It had already been produced and made available on SoundCloud when Abby asked me to transcribe it for print publication.  I’ll have to look through my audio archives to share with you my copy of the audio file, which may have been taken down from SoundCloud by Media Roots.  I do recall hearing Abby Martin on the Joe Rogan Experience more recently, after getting her own TV show on RT, Breaking the Set, either, backing away from her previous views on 9/11 or simply shying away from discussing them to avoid stigmas associated with frankly discussing 9/11.


[30 OCT 2015  06:52 PST]

[Last modified 11 APR 2016  06:56 PDT]