Tucker Carlson examines unanswered questions and disputed theories surrounding the September 11 attacks
Episode four of Tucker Carlson's The 9/11 Files documentary series, examining Building 7's collapse, pre-attack financial trading, and foreign intelligence foreknowledge.
Summary
Tucker Carlson presents the fourth episode of his 9/11 Files series, arguing that the U.S. government's own conduct after the September 11 attacks — concealing video evidence, immediately shipping debris overseas, suppressing investigation, and burying Osama bin Laden at sea — created the conditions in which conspiracy theories flourished. The episode focuses on three major areas of unresolved controversy: the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which the 9/11 Commission's 577-page report did not address; anomalous put-option trading against United Airlines, American Airlines, and major financial institutions in the days before the attacks, with the identity of the primary trader still classified; and evidence that foreign intelligence services, including Israeli operatives, may have had advance knowledge of the attacks that was not shared with the United States. Carlson closes by listing a series of specific questions he argues the 9/11 Commission failed to ask, and calls for a new, genuinely independent investigation.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: How to Make Conspiracy Theories Flourish
Tucker Carlson: If you wanted conspiracy theories to flourish after the September 11 attacks, here is what you would do. You would hide the video evidence of the attacks themselves. You would ship the debris from the attacks overseas immediately, without examining it. You would describe everyone who questioned the official story as crazy or criminal. You would run a campaign of lies so obvious about the attacks that occurred. You would do everything in your power to prevent a real investigation into what happened. You would avoid any public trials. And when you caught the perpetrator and killed him, you would release no photos or video evidence of the raid in which he was killed. Then you would throw his body into the middle of the ocean. Then you would use the attack to justify invading a country that had nothing to do with it on behalf of a foreign power.
In other words, you would do exactly what the United States government did. In the aftermath of September 11, it is likely that people who wanted conspiracy theories to flourish were out there. The weirder, the better. The more time people spent wondering about directed energy weapons, the less time they spent focusing on what is obvious — the facts hiding in plain sight. And the main fact they are ignoring is our own government's central role in facilitating those attacks. We established that in the first episode of this series, and the extraordinary levels of incompetence that allowed bin Laden — from Kandahar, Afghanistan — to execute the most complex terrorist attacks in history.
On the other hand, not all of the stranger theories about September 11 are crazy. Some raise legitimate questions. In this episode, we will go through those theories one by one and explain, based on documents, interviews, and contemporaneous reporting, what we know about them.
The Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
The North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed at 10:28 a.m. on September 11. As it fell, burning debris damaged many of the surrounding buildings, including World Trade Center Building 7. It was a 47-story steel-frame building located approximately one football field away across Vesey Street. Notably, a building between the North Tower and Building 7 did not collapse.
The collapse of Building 7 is not mentioned at all in the 9/11 Commission report. Five hundred and seventy-seven pages, but no explanation for why Building 7 fell. And that raised very obvious questions. People have been talking about it for the past twenty-four years.
But if you watch some of these pieces, you can see how they turn to dust before they reach the ground. A steel building does not fall into its own footprint because a plane hit another building a few hundred yards away.
Witness: I didn't see a plane. They said the plane hit the first building. The second one just exploded.
The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Building 7 and the near-total absence of any explanation for why it fell eventually led to a U.S. Senate investigation.
Senator: Let's start with Building 7. Again, I don't think you can find structural engineers who say that thing fell in any way other than controlled demolition.
Building 7 had remarkable tenants. They included, ironically, New York City's Office of Emergency Management — the office responsible for responding to the September 11 attacks. On the ninth and tenth floors was the New York field office of the U.S. Secret Service, whose equipment and records were destroyed in the building's collapse. The twenty-fifth floor housed a secret CIA office, whose records were also destroyed. Across the twenty-fifth floor was an office of the Department of Defense. It is unclear what it was doing there.
Building 7 was one of only three buildings to collapse that day. The collapse of the other two — the Twin Towers — was extensively covered in the September 11 report, of course, but Building 7 was almost entirely ignored.
Even on the morning of the September 11 attacks, prominent figures were already questioning whether a plane could bring down a steel building.
Commentator: I said, how can a plane — even if it's a 767 or a 747 or whatever it is — how can it penetrate steel? I think it wasn't just a plane, but there were bombs that went off almost simultaneously, because I just can't imagine anything that could penetrate that wall. It seemed to me that to do this kind of damage, you need more than just a big plane, because you're talking about destroying steel — the hardest steel used in construction. I mean, these buildings were rock solid.
What the Official Investigations Found
One of the reasons the 9/11 Commission may have effectively ignored the collapse of Building 7 is that, even now, we don't really know much about it. On the morning of September 11, lower Manhattan was sealed off from the public by military checkpoints. World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed that afternoon at 5:25 p.m. A widely circulated video clip shows the building falling symmetrically into its own footprint. At the same time, several buildings closer to the Twin Towers remained standing. That is genuinely strange.
Then the debris was entirely removed immediately and shipped to Asia. That is far stranger.
Reporter: Where did all the debris go? And is there any way you can answer that question?
Reporter 2: Sorry, Peter, I didn't catch that.
Many people, including Jackie Judd, are asking why there is suddenly so little debris at the site of the Twin Towers. Where did all that debris go?
Reporter 2: That's a very good question. Peter and I asked some of the people who were doing some of the rescue and recovery work this morning. If you look behind me, you can see the structural remains of the World Trade Center. One volunteer, Robert Garlinski, explained to me that the reason there is so little debris is that everything simply fell into the ground and disintegrated, vaporized. Now, I have to say, over the past few hours there has been an amazing and constant stream of dump trucks and other very large vehicles removing debris.
According to a New York Times article published five months after the attacks: "An unknown number of steel columns were shipped to factories as far away as Asia without being examined or preserved... This made it nearly impossible for engineers to answer the enormous questions about why and how the buildings — designed to withstand the full impact of a jetliner — collapsed. To the extent any analysis of the debris was conducted, it was done by volunteers at a scrap yard in Jersey City, New Jersey."
Reporter: The deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation involves very thin pieces of steel gathered from the Twin Towers and from World Trade Center Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper that also collapsed. For reasons unknown, the steel appears to have melted. But no fire in any of the buildings was thought to be hot enough to melt steel completely.
Two agencies investigated the collapses. One was FEMA, with its volunteers. The other was NIST — the National Institute of Standards and Technology, funded by Congress. FEMA's explanation: debris from the North Tower damaged the facade of Building 7 and ignited fires in the lower floors. NIST stated that the collapse of the Twin Towers damaged the main water pipes, disabling the sprinkler systems. Since the building had been evacuated in the morning and firefighting resources were depleted by ongoing search and rescue operations, fire commanders decided early on not to fight the fires in Building 7.
According to NIST's report, thermal expansion of steel beams — not melting steel — caused the failure of the connections linking a critical beam, Beam 2001A, to Column 79. That connection failed. The beam shifted six and a quarter inches from its position, leading to what is known as progressive collapse. This means the collapse began in one area and then spread downward through the rest of the building by gravity. That is the explanation.
Two questions come to mind, and both are obvious. First, if there was only a single point of failure, why does the video evidence show the building falling symmetrically all at once at free-fall acceleration — a scene resembling a controlled demolition, where supporting columns are cut simultaneously? Second, how have other steel-frame buildings around the world, similar to Building 7, performed during fires?
In 1991, a fire broke out in the 38-story One Meridian Plaza building in Philadelphia, spread across eight floors, and burned for eighteen hours. The building did not collapse. In 1988, a massive fire broke out in the 62-story First Interstate Bank building in Los Angeles, starting on the twelfth floor. There was no structural collapse. In 2017, the 24-story Grenfell Tower in London burned for more than twenty-four hours. The internal steel held. So why did Building 7 collapse after only seven hours of burning, in a manner no steel-frame building anywhere in the world had ever collapsed before?
The University of Alaska Study and the Thermite Question
With support from a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Professor Leroy Hulsey of the University of Alaska Fairbanks conducted an independent study whose findings were published in 2020. Professor Hulsey found that office fires of the type present in Building 7 on September 11 could not have produced sufficient thermal expansion to cause the failure of the critical beam. He found that to be impossible. More importantly, he and his team found that NIST's explanation does not account for what anyone can see in the video — that the entire building fell at once. Not in a progressive collapse, but in a total collapse. Something else, therefore, must have caused the fall. His conclusion was that the only thing that could have caused a collapse like the one seen on television was controlled demolition.
Our ability to analyze the collapse is limited by the video we have. We do not have footage of the south side of the building, where the fires were, because cameras there were likely destroyed or obscured by the collapse of the Twin Towers.
One problem with the controlled demolition hypothesis is that the widely circulated video of the building's collapse was selectively edited. In fact, the building did not collapse entirely at once. It fell in two stages. What you are seeing now is the complete, unedited collapse video. It shows the penthouse collapsing first, and then very quickly, the rest of the building collapsing. The unedited video raises more questions than it answers. It challenges NIST's official account, but it does not conclusively show a controlled demolition either.
Because of the speed with which authorities shipped the debris overseas, we did not get a thorough forensic investigation of the wreckage. However, a group of scientists collected and tested four samples of dust and debris gathered by a Manhattan resident beginning approximately ten minutes after the collapse of the second World Trade Center tower through the following day, and a fourth sample collected approximately a week later. In 2009, they published their findings in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. In those samples, the scientists found distinctive red and gray chips filled with high-energy thermitic material. In other words, they found traces of explosive compounds.
To NIST's credit, it investigated multiple hypothetical explosion scenarios but found them impossible to execute in any floor of the building without being detected, and that they would have required the removal or cutting of columns with welding torches and the wiring of detonators. NIST found that the window-breakage patterns in the visible floors were not at all consistent with what would be expected from an explosion. NIST did not test the attack debris for thermite, but noted that thermite burns slowly compared to explosives and would require several minutes of contact with a massive steel section to heat it to a temperature causing significant weakening. They also estimated that no less than 0.13 pounds of thermite would be required to heat each pound of steel section to approximately 700 degrees Celsius — the temperature at which steel weakens significantly. This means that if Building 7 were demolished using thermite, thousands of pounds of it would have had to be placed undetected in advance, ignited remotely, and somehow kept in direct contact with the surfaces of hundreds of massive structural components to weaken the building — making it an unlikely material for achieving a controlled demolition.
NIST also says that an explosion large enough to bring down the building would have been far louder than any noise recorded near the time of the building's collapse. And yet eyewitness testimony says people heard explosions inside the building.
Barry Jennings: The whole time I was in there, I heard explosions. I heard explosions.
Carlson's team attempted to interview that witness. His name was Barry Jennings, but he died young, at fifty-three, just two days before NIST's report on Building 7 was released.
Director Spike Lee attempted to cover the story in an HBO documentary series titled NYC Epicenters 9/11–2021½. In an interview with the New York Times, Lee said that the amount of heat required to melt the steel was not reported, and that when you compare the way Building 7 fell to other building collapses that were demolitions, it looks like you are watching the same thing. For doing so, the Times of Israel accused him of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. Lee ultimately re-edited his documentary and removed the sections that questioned the official account of Building 7's collapse.
Pre-Attack Financial Trading
Another unusual aspect of Building 7's collapse is that some media outlets announced it before it actually happened.
Tucker Carlson: Here is footage of the BBC announcing the fall of Building 7. Remember, this was filmed live twenty minutes before Building 7 actually collapsed.
BBC Anchor: Jane, what more can you tell us about the Salomon Brothers building and its collapse?
Salomon Brothers was the main tenant of Building 7, and the tower is visible in the background of the shot. Was this rushed coverage on the day of the attacks, or did the BBC have advance knowledge of the building's collapse?
If media outlets knew in advance about events that day, they were not alone. In the 9/11 Commission report, on page 499, in a footnote that is easy to miss, there is mention of a massive spike in put options — investments that profit when stock prices fall. These options were placed against the parent company of United Airlines on September 6, and then against American Airlines on September 10. Incredibly, the report goes on to note that ninety-five percent of the trades against United Airlines were made by a single U.S.-based institutional investor. So who was that investor? We don't know. The U.S. government continues to hide the name. They refuse to tell us why. The Commission's report notes that a federal investigation concluded those trades were "benign" — whatever that means. But researchers later discovered findings that directly contradict that conclusion, as the trading volumes showed enormous levels of statistical significance.
There were other trades as well. On September 7, the number of put options placed against British Airways was four times the normal volume. The number of put options against American Airlines on the day before the attack was 285 times the normal volume. In the days before the attacks, put options against Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch rose sharply. Both banks had large offices in the World Trade Center. There were also notable spikes in call options on gold and oil before the attacks.
But who, other than al-Qaeda, would have known about the attacks?
Foreign Intelligence Foreknowledge
An important aspect of the September 11 attacks that is often overlooked is that foreign intelligence agencies — even from supposed allies — may have had detailed advance knowledge of the event.
John Kiriakou: These 9/11 hijackers came from Germany. Were the Germans oblivious, or did they not tell us anything about them?
John Kiriakou served as chief of counterespionage in the bin Laden unit. What about the Israelis? What about the Saudis? There is strong evidence that members of the Saudi royal family were working with al-Qaeda terrorists. The 9/11 Commission — and this is not surprising — ignored this subject entirely.
Here is what we know. In January 2001, French intelligence learned that al-Qaeda was planning to hijack an American plane. What and when the French told America, we do not know. But they were not alone. Others knew.
Michael Scheuer: Well, without a doubt, the Israelis and perhaps the British had better information than the people working against Osama bin Laden at the Agency. Much better information.
Michael Scheuer ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA in the 1990s. Foreign governments may have had superior information because the NSA shared signals intelligence details with them — details it withheld from the CIA. Signals intelligence is a form of espionage that intercepts phone calls and wireless communications.
We needed to collect signals intelligence from Afghanistan. Because there was no central phone company or telecommunications companies, it was very limited. You had to be lucky to find the signal. We found two signals and shared the information with the NSA. They collected the information and didn't share it with us in its raw form. NSA reports are summaries of what people are saying over the phone. You don't always know who is talking to whom. The first thing we did when we got the first versions was to send translations to the NSA and say, will you give us the other half of this? They said thank you, but under the 1947 statute that created the NSA, we are not required to share that, and we won't.
But somehow the Israelis and the Saudis were always able to find out there was something they wanted. And so when we refused, the White House would order the Director of Central Intelligence to give it to them.
We know very little about the NSA's advance knowledge of September 11 because the 9/11 Commission barely investigated. Remember that the NSA is by far the largest American intelligence agency, and yet the Commission did not assign a single staffer to research its files, partly because some of its commissioners and staff simply did not understand what the NSA was and what it did. To this day, its terrorism archives have not been comprehensively reviewed by outside investigators. If someone examined those files, they would find a treasure trove of previously undisclosed warnings about the September 11 attacks.
The NSA was the primary entity monitoring the switchboard through which al-Qaeda operatives communicated. It is absurd, given what Americans pay for signals intelligence to be collected, translated, and provided to the American intelligence community, that the British, the Saudis, and the Israelis received information from our NSA that we at the Agency were not lucky enough to get.
Israeli Intelligence and the "Dancing Israelis"
Foreign governments may have had advance knowledge of September 11, but the Israeli government stands out, and here is why. On the morning of September 11, a group of five Israeli citizens allegedly witnessed the initial explosion at the World Trade Center and were seen celebrating the event. At the time, the celebrations received extensive media coverage.
Fox News reporter: Fox News has learned that American investigators believe that Israelis heavily involved in spying in the United States may have known things they didn't tell us before September 11.
It is shocking to see agents of an allied state celebrating the deaths of Americans. But some in Israel saw the attack as beneficial to them. A New York Times article dated September 12, 2001 quotes Benjamin Netanyahu responding to September 11: "It's very good" — before adding, "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." Netanyahu anticipated that the attack would strengthen the relationship between the two peoples, saying they had suffered terrorism for decades but the United States had now experienced a massive bleeding from terrorism.
According to FBI documents, the Israelis who celebrated the September 11 attacks and were arrested in New Jersey had filmed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and may have had advance knowledge of it. Found in their possession were box cutters, multiple passports, thousands of dollars in cash, and photographs of them smiling with the burning World Trade Center in the background.
Michael Scheuer: The Israelis are always with the Israelis first — always. They don't like the United States, except for our money most of the time. But our NSA produces information for them that is not shareable with its own people. Go figure.
FBI records and polygraph tests revealed no advance knowledge of the attacks on their part, but they were involved in illegal foreign espionage and deception in the United States. Their leader, Dominic Suter, fled to Israel on September 14, 2001, was placed on the federal terrorism list, and his information was shared with European allies in May 2002. Most of the Israelis were detained for two and a half months and then deported for visa violations — a common method of expelling foreign intelligence agents from allied countries.
The Israelis are known to boast of their ability to penetrate every Arab intelligence service, every terrorist group. Did the Israelis know about September 11 and keep quiet?
A 9/11 Commission memo presented substantial evidence suggesting that Israeli intelligence operatives were strategically positioned throughout the United States. Notably, they were living in close proximity to the September 11 hijackers. Groups of Israelis traveled as artists, drawing things, and were found around Cape Canaveral — I remember — and other places with things to draw and map, and also notably near military installations or other types of government facilities. So I think that is an open question.
The Israeli so-called art students focused their operations in Hollywood, Florida and northern New Jersey. These are the exact locations of the hijackers before the attack. According to the memo: "It is very difficult to believe, based on the evidence available and the location of their shared central operational bases, that this group was not also tracking the future hijackers and their associates."
According to The Forward, a Jewish publication: "The Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating with Washington."
Within a week of the attack, Israeli intelligence officials claimed they had warned the United States of large-scale terrorist attacks on prominent targets in the United States. But the details of those warnings have never been published. There is no evidence they occurred.
John Kiriakou: Honestly, throughout my career in counterterrorism from 1992 to 2004, I never once saw a single piece of information from the Israelis that was of any real value.
Unanswered Questions and the Call for a New Investigation
As Americans, we need a new commission from Washington — one that is truly independent, that does not lie, but investigates what happened on September 11 and answers our questions raised in this episode.
Who decided to ship the debris from the attacks out of this country immediately, and why? What was the role of the CIA's office in Building 7? What signals intelligence did the NSA have regarding the conspiracy, and how much of it did they share with foreign governments? What did those foreign governments know and not tell the United States?
The American public deserves immediate answers to those questions — questions the 9/11 Commission itself ignored. Why did the FBI's most-wanted poster for Osama bin Laden, updated in November 2001, omit any mention of the September 11 attacks? Why did it take the government five years to release footage of the Pentagon? And why are there only two videos available to the public of the Pentagon strike? The Pentagon was one of the most guarded and surveilled buildings on the planet, and yet, more than twenty years later, there are only two videos.
Why did U.S. forces suddenly bury Osama bin Laden at sea and release no photographs of his body? By the way, how difficult would it be for amateur pilots with only basic training and no experience flying jumbo jets to navigate to lower Manhattan and hit a building? The majority of the hijackers were flagged for additional screening at the airport. How did they get onto those watch lists, and why didn't security slow them down?
Why was there no large debris from Flight 93 at its alleged crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania? We were told that the crash of that plane was so powerful that it vaporized the aircraft's fuselage — and yet the hijackers' passports were found intact at the site. How does that happen? And who was the 9/11 Commission's unwillingness to answer these questions protecting? Someone was being protected. The 9/11 Commission did not raise any of these questions. It is time for someone to ask them and for the government to answer them.
Conclusion
On September 11, 2001, nearly three thousand people were killed. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more perished as a result of our response to those attacks. The government enacted measures that suspended constitutional protections — the liberties this country was founded to protect are now gone. The government used illegal wartime tactics, including torture and the killing of innocent individuals. Those attacks fundamentally changed the way America operates and the way all of us live here.
Yet not everyone suffered in the aftermath of September 11. Some prospered. The winners — we reveal who benefited from September 11 — in the next part of our series.