September 11: conspiracy theories still valid after 20 years of the Twin Towers attack

Filmmaker Spike Lee, the QAnon movement, social media or gatherings of friends and family keep them alive: 9/11 conspiracy theories never went away, have only evolved and the twentieth anniversary of the attacks mingle with pandemic conspiracies.

The scale and complexity of the attacks that caused 3000 dead and led to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled many fanciful assumptions, but almost all of them converged on the idea that the real perpetrator was not the terrorist group Al-Quaïda, but the United States government.

Thus the theory of “controlled demolition”. This denies that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the impact of the two commercial planes that the terrorists made to strike the buildings and the fire caused by the collision.

Twenty years later, the director Spike lee highlighted this plot in his documentary series for HBO on the attacks, “NYC Epicenters 9 / 11-2021½”.

Lee included the opinions of the group of architects and engineers for the “Truth about September 11” in a first version of the assembly, which he decided to modify after the criticisms received. This conspiracy theory and others are being kept alive on social media due to the action of new disinformation actors, such as the QAnon movement.

In Spain and Latin America, this deceptive content is reproduced on websites specializing in the publication of lies, very active during the pandemic. Recently, for example, several websites have published that relatives of survivorss “claim to present evidence to a grand jury that explosives were used to destroy the World Trade Center,” in an article supporting this unfounded belief.

The official investigation contradicts such speculations, as shown, among other documents, andl report of the bipartite commission created by Congress to analyze the facts.

On the other hand, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, for its acronym in English) determined in 2005 that planes that collided with the Twin Towers caused structural damage to the support columns of buildings and dthey dumped around 30,000 liters of fuel on the skyscrapers.

The consequences were the fire of the towers, with temperatures of 1000 degrees and their subsequent collapse. Investigators never found explosive charges or other evidence of controlled demolition.

World Trade Center Building 7

Another theory that strongly persists and is linked to the premeditated demolition hypothesis is the one that highlights the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC 7), a 47-story skyscraper in which no aircraft have hit, as proof that the collapse responded to a plan of the US administration.

Another NIST report, in this case dated 2008, attributes the collapse of WTC 7 to fires that broke out after the fall of the North Tower, which burned for seven hours in flames. Again, no evidence of an intentional collapse has been found.

As part of this speculation, conspirators pointed out that among the remains of Building 7, a termite, a type of pyrotechnic material that is also used for welding, had been found, but studies by the United States Geological Survey and the RJ Lee Lab ruled out this possibility.

Over the years, a story that links anthrax attacks has also gained relevance – misnamed “anthrax” in Spanish due to an error in the translation of the English word “anthrax” – con el 11-S. Just a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, letters containing anthrax spores began to be sent to the media and politicians, causing five deaths. Although these are unrelated events, supporters of the existence of an internal conspiracy have been determined to connect these events.

Some supporters of this idea have subsequently become prominent figures in organizations denying the pandemic, as is the case of the German Heiko Shöning, one of the promoters of Doctors for the Truth.

Moreover, among the events promoted these days to analyze and discussing the aforementioned hypotheses on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the attacks sheds light on a conference organized by the Lawyers Committee for the 9/11 Investigation entitled, precisely, “From 9/11-Anthrax to the Pandemic”.

These conjecture-based intrigues gained a greater presence and displaced others that gained attention in the first years after the attacks. Some of them argued that the Pentagon was attacked by a missile or that the United Airlines 93 plane – which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers attempted to take control of the plane – was shot down by fighters of the US Air Force.