The American Truth

With the help of the mainstream media, I'm sure you've heard over and over again the government's side of the story. However, I thought it would beneficial to summarize the "official account" of what happened on 9/11.

Immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government stated the country's intelligence indicated the attacks were carried out by members of the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda, headed by Osama Bin Laden.

On the morning of September 11, the government said, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes by using knives, box cutters, pepper spray and fake explosives. The hijackers then crashed the planes into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon.

According to government and independent studies, the World Trade Center towers later collapsed due to the impact damage, removal of the fire protection and the intense fires. Due to the collapse of World Trade Center One and Two, surrounding World Trade Center buildings were heavily damaged as well, leading in turn to their complete or partial collapse. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania later that day after passengers learned via air phone of the other attacks and mounted resistance to that plane's hijackers.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and FEMA conducted building performance studies at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.[16] The Intelligence Committees of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate conducted a Joint Inquiry in 2002. U.S. government officials, such as Condoleezza Rice, said they had no advance knowledge of the attacks and no idea that such a thing might happen. Organizations representing the victims' families such as the Jersey Girls demanded further investigation and, after initial reluctance, the administration acceded to their request.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission was formed tasked with “not placing individual blame” but providing an explanation as to what happened and making recommendations to prevent a recurrence. In 2004 the commission released its report. It disclosed that there were prior warnings of varying detail that the United States would be attacked by al-Qaeda. These were ignored, the report said, due to a lack of communication between various law enforcement and intelligence personnel. For the lack of interagency communication, the report cited bureaucratic inertia and laws passed in the 1970s to prevent abuses that resulted in major scandals during that era.

The report also faulted both the Clinton and the Bush administration with “failure of imagination”. The explanation laid out in the report has been endorsed by most members of both major political parties, and is what conspiracy theorists refer to as "the official account" of the September, 2001 attacks, which only focuses on government sources.