It is barely more than two years since our leaders - those who told us about Iraq's WMDs and the Jessica Lynch rescue - asserted a scenario far less credible than the child killer Ian Huntley's claim of the sudden deaths of two healthy 10-year-olds in a bathroom "accident". Three skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon collapsed, ostensibly as a result of fires related to four hijacked airliners that morning. But the official BTS records show that two of the flights - AA 0011 and AA 0077 - were not even scheduled for September 11, 2001, due to low bookings. (And many of the "hijackers" turned up alive and well.) Records of a third plane, tail number N612UA, which was allegedly steered by Arabs into the South Tower, show an opportune gap between its arrival at Boston on 7/9/01 and its departure from JFK, New York, on 10/9/01. There was ample time for covert operatives to fit software patches to enable remote-controlled flight, gas canisters to knock out flight crew, etc.

It has now been calculated that the gravitational potential energy of some 100 kWh per tower was insufficient to sink the very near free-fall collapse, pulverisation of concrete and rapid expansion of dust clouds. But strategically placed thermite ignited with a magnesium fuse could have reliably instigated the observed demolition. And unlike kerosene, thermite is capable of melting steel. US intelligence claimed not to "see this one coming", yet the National Reconnaissance Office was running an exercise of a plane crashing into a building on the morning of 9/11. And the original pilot of the plane that supposedly hit the Pentagon had drafted an emergence response plan for the Pentagon in the event of a hit by a civilian plane.

Where the buck stops, the death penalty should start.

Written in November 2003.