Introduction

September 11, 2001 was a tragic day of fate and luck. This catastrophe almost 20 years ago caused many people to lose their lives as well as people they love. On this day, Joseph Lott, a sales representative for Compaq Computers, lived to see another day because of his fondness for art ties. “It began many years earlier, in the ’90s,” Lott recalled. “I love impressionist paintings, and I use them as a way to make points with my kids. I’d put on an art tie, and then I would ask my kids—I have three daughters—I would say, ‘Artist identification?’ And they would have to tell me whether it was a Van Gogh or a Monet, and we would have a little conversation about the artist.” That morning, he had put on a green shirt before a meeting at the Marriott that was directly between the Twin Towers. At breakfast, a coworker, Elaine Greenberg, gave him a Monet tie that she had found on a trip the week before. The tie was red and blue and did not match with his shirt. “This is such a nice gesture. I think I am going to put this on and wear it as I speak.” He told Elaine, “Well, not with that shirt. You’re not going to put on a red-and-blue tie with a green shirt.” After breakfast, he did what he was told while everyone else went to the 104th floor of the north tower. “As I was waiting to go from the seventh floor back down to the lobby and over to the bank of elevators that would take me to the top, I felt a sudden movement in the building,” he recalled. Little did he know, if Elaine did not give him the tie he would have been on the 104th floor.

Lott and many others were lucky enough to escape that day, although people like Elaine Greenberg were not fortunate enough to see another day. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 has caused many people to conjure up answers to the events that led to that tragic day, Jesse Ventura being one of them. The former professional wrestler and Governor of Minnesota, made many claims throughout this video that are not necessarily backed up by evidence of what happened during the 9/11 attacks. We are going to take a look at these claims of whether 9/11 was planned and covered up with the intent of deceiving the American people and see if they will soar or come crashing down.

1. Jesse Ventura: professional wrestler, author, and governor (0:02)

Well that’s not really the case here. Jesse was not a very credible candidate for governor, his only experience in politics was when he was the Mayor of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. In an article by Michael Brodkorb of the Star Tribune, “The credibility Ventura gained when he was elected governor has been washed away in the years since he left office.” Although when he was in office, he was criticized tremendously for his economic inexpertise. “Tom Stinson not[ed] that the statewide capital gain fell from $9 billion to $4 billion between 2000 and 2001.” Then “when he left office in 2003, Minnesota had a $4.2 billion budget deficit, compared to the $3 billion budget surplus when Ventura took office in 1999” (Brodkorb). In another article by Hayley Tsukayama of the Star Tribune, Bill O’Reilly, a Conservative American journalist on a segment of Fox News, voiced his opinion of Ventura calling him a “pinhead” after a remark from him early in the broadcast calling Bill O’Reilly, and two other Fox News hosts “The Three Stooges.” This shows that even when he was in office, he did not make the best decisions and choices, and those choices impacted the state of Minnesota in a very negative way and others took notice.

2. “The Bush Administration ignored intelligence.” (0:45)

“if we had known an attack was

coming against the United States,

we would have moved heaven

and earth to stop it.”

Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice

The first claim the video makes involves the government’s actions the summer before September 11 occurred. There are many problems with this speculation. Ventura stated in the interview that “we knew with Condoleezza Rice’s memo on August 6th, […] ‘Bin Laden to steal planes and run them into buildings’” (0:34). He claims that they completely ignored intelligence but we know now, that is not how everything went down. When Bush first took office, Bill Clinton and his administration briefed President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on anything and everything. Because of their briefing with the Clinton Administration, they knew Al Qaeda was a real threat to our country and “[they] wanted to ensure that there was not respite in the fight against Al Qaeda. On an operational level, therefore, we decided immediately to continue to pursue the Clinton administration’s covert action authorities and other efforts to fight the network.” Many Americans doubted the Bush administration and their efforts with Al Qaeda, Ventura being one of them. During Condoleezza Rice’s testimony, she clearly stated on the stand how the events of 9/11 transpired, “the decision that we made was to, first of all, have no drop-off in what the Clinton administration was doing, because clearly they had done a lot of work to deal with this very important priority” (Rice). During these revived meetings that the Clinton administration had done as well, that happened almost every day since January 20, the President, Secretary of State, and the Chief of Staff all were given up-to-date information by the top intelligence officials. There were more than 40 different pieces of intelligence that were given to the President in those 8 months, and 13 of them were in response to questions the Bush administration inquired.

During the course of these 8 months President Bush decided their plan was not working so the administration resorted to another plan. The former President wanted to completely eliminate Al Qaeda once and for all because “he was sick of swatting flies.” At the time, they were responding to every individual attack and he was tired of it. In regards to this, the administration had decided on a brand new strategy. They had a set goal of “the elimination of the Al Qaeda network and threat and ordered the leadership of relevant U.S. departments and agencies to make the elimination of Al Qaeda a high priority and to use all aspects of our national power, intelligence, financial, diplomatic and military to meet that goal” (Rice). This strategy basically gave every department head and secretary a specific task in the removal of Al Qaeda. For instance, Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State, worked with many countries to end all places of refuge for Al Qaeda. Other secretaries worked with these countries to freeze their assets and sponsors. Then Central Intelligence worked to create a belligerent plan of secret missions that would impede Al Qaeda and provide assistance to the Anti-Taliban in Afghanistan. These actions, and many more, that were taken by our government were necessary to the destruction of Al Qaeda.

Many people do not know exactly how intelligence works and how hard it is to stop these types of attacks in this day and age. There is so much more technology that has been developed and discovered that makes their job that much harder.  Rich Disabatino, director of the Intelligence Support Group, also commented on this saying, “the [lack of] advanced notice is not surprising, because of the amount of time that it would take to decode, the amount of time and manpower and budget requirements that it would take to do this on all the targets throughout the country; actually, throughout the world. […] Because of the level of sophistication, it was impossible to figure out what was going on in a real time mode, in a mode that would have given us the proper warning for the constraints that were on our intelligence agency at the time” (PBS). This all but proves that they were not ignoring it, but actually working so much harder to stop this type of attack from happening than most civilians will ever know.

3. “[The Government] ignored intelligence because they wanted [9/11] to happen” (0:50)

Piers Morgan, broadcaster for CNN, is talking with Jesse Ventura about his take on 9/11, but he is not the only one with this belief.  According to The Wall Street Journal, self-named “9/11 Truthers”, are also “bent on pinning 9/11 on the US rather than Al Qaeda” (Graff). These types of conspiracy theories were attacks on President Bush and his staff. Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State for the United States under George W. Bush. When asked in front of the 9/11 commission, she pretty much debunked this by saying, “if we had known an attack was coming against the United States, we would have moved heaven and earth to stop it.”

During her testimony, Timothy Roemer, former United States Representative, questioned Rice about what went wrong that day. He also questioned the authority of her as well as the President saying, “somehow, somewhere that this was not done well enough.” She responded simply by saying we did not have enough information as well as protection “and I think we’ve all asked ourselves what more could have been done” (Rice). Since that day, America has been at war. Rice also mentioned that until the threat to the United States is abolished, we will remain at war.

In an interview with PBS, Bill Esposito, former Deputy Director of the FBI during the Clinton administration, talks about what he believes happened that day. When asked why it seemed like everyone was “asleep at the wheel” when many people from the middle east were coming here. He responded simply by saying “Today, after Sept. 11, it looks like, ‘Why didn’t anybody know that?’ But before Sept. 11, you have a situation where you have a number of people, and it’s just not people of Arabic extraction. It’s a number of people signing up for flight schools and taking lessons.” […] “As a matter of fact, I’m convinced of that, because if it was out of the ordinary, there would have been more calls into law enforcement about what was going on” (PBS). Just because there was “a man with a Saudi passport taking commercial flight training here at my school, and I’m suspicious,” it does not mean you can open up a case right then and there. “Not unless you checked the name and found out that this was a name that was actually tied to a terrorist cell somewhere” Esposito said. There are so many people that fly into our country every single day. So even if the government wanted to track every person that came into our country, illegally or not, they couldn’t. It’s almost impossible.

Congressman Porter Goss also keyed in on the absence of information that day. We certainly had plenty of alerts that there was something going to happen. What we didn’t have was the where, and the when, and the how. And no matter how hard we tried, there are enough of these terrorists out there now that they can occasionally make things happen that we are not going to know about, because we do not have enough resources deployed across the network to know all of these things timely” (PBS). This all but proves that it was basically impossible to know how the attacks of September 11 were going to transpire. They did not have the technology and capabilities to know all those things at that time.

4. Condoleezza Rice, Former Secretary of State (0:34)

Our second expert is President Bush’s former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We are going to look at the validity of her claims of the events leading up to one of the biggest catastrophes in United State’s history. Rice is an American diplomat and is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State in 2005 to 2009 and as the 20th United States National Security Advisor in 2001 to 2005. Rice was the first female African-American Secretary of State and the first woman to be the National Security Advisor. She also worked under President Carter in the State Department and later joined the Bush administration as his Secretary of State. Rice is very highly praised in Bush’s books as he said at her swearing in ceremony; “Over the past four years, America has benefited from the wise counsel of Dr. Condoleezza Rice and our family has been enriched by our friendship with this remarkable person. We love her—I don’t know if you’re supposed to say that about the secretary of state.”

Although she is highly applauded by many, she still is criticized because of her work and intelligence. One of these criticizers goes by the name of Barbara Boxer. She is a former democratic United States Representative. According to an article by Carolyn O’Hara of Foreign Policy, Boxer does not agree with sending more troops to Iraq in 2007 and wants to know who is going to pay the price for that. “I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.” She also sheds light to a very intimate topic that “Condi isn’t going to pay a personal price for sending more troops to Iraq because she is a single female.” This personal dig and implying that she is less capable of doing her job and making decisions that affect the people of this country because she is not married with kids, that is just completely ignorant. Condoleezza Rice is a very credible source as she was there the day of September 11 as well as months before trying to stop it from happening. Although she is not highly praised by Barbara Boxer, she is more than critically acclaimed by Former President Bush and so many others.

5. “[Jesse] has a tape of a BBC reporter broadcasting directly back to England talking about a third building has collapsed, World Trade Center building 7 […] While she’s talking it’s standing right behind her” (1:38)

Ventura believes BBC was doing a pre-broadcast of the WTC and sending it back to england saying, “this building has fallen” when it’s standing right behind her and wasn’t going to fall for another twenty minutes. BBC also posted their statement on what happened during their coverage that day, and many weren’t impressed. The comments on the claim were anything but content. Many people had questions about what happened with the feed and the information they were given. One commentator, Justin Ross said, “If there was no conspiracy on your part, then tell us who told BBC News that WTC 7 fell down before it actually happened. The video you’re looking for will show the building before collapse with your reporter telling the public it had already collapsed.” Many of the comments on BBC’s claim were exactly like this, wanting answers.

They later ask the reporter, Jane Standley, and like everyone else that was there that day, has the events of the attack burned into her memory, but does not remember every single thing she said in that broadcast. But who would? She was only presenting the information that was given to her at the time and making sense of that. Everything that happened that day was abnormal and when something like that happens, things turn out to be inaccurate, that part is normal. And because of that, they no longer have the original tapes to that broadcast. Because they are inaccurate not because they are trying to hide something. “So the guy in the studio didn’t quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy… ” (BBC).

Conclusion

There are still so many people to this day, 20 years later, that believe our own government had something to do with a cover up involving 9/11. Minnesota’s former governor is one of the biggest believers of this and so this review may help many people who had doubts about the attack or had friends or family who were victims of the attack find peace in the fact that our own government did everything they could to stop 9/11. They were working with us, not against us. They did everything they could with the information they had at the time, and that’s all you can ask for. As Condoleezza Rice once said, “they would have moved Heaven and Earth to stop it.”

Featured image is from the video.