The Crime of the Century
What did the term "ground zero" mean before the 11th of September, 2001?
Every English dictionary printed before that morning gave the same answer, and only that answer. Not two meanings. Not three. One. This page sets out, in brief, what my book demonstrates at length – and why the name given to the ruins in Manhattan within hours of their destruction was, in itself, a confession.
The definition
ground zero – the point on the surface of the earth or water directly below, directly above, or at which an atomic or thermonuclear bomb detonates.
Webster's Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary
ground zero – the point on the ground directly under the explosion of a nuclear weapon.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary
ground zero – the surface area directly below and above the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb.
The New International Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, 1999
More than twenty dictionaries printed before 9/11 carry this definition and no other. After 9/11 the dictionaries were quietly revised. Some acquired new meanings. Some, as I show in the book, appear to have been printed later and given earlier dates.
A dictionary that knew the future?
Consider one volume: Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, published by Gramercy Books, ISBN 978-0-517-15026-9, bearing the date April 1996. It can be bought and held in the hand.
Turn to the entry for Hong Kong. It states that the territory reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The past tense. The handover took place on the 1st of July, 1997 – fifteen months after this book was supposedly printed. No editor working in 1996 would describe a future event as one already completed. He would write "will revert".
A dictionary cannot know the future. It can only be printed after the fact and dated before it.
Three truths
The first truth – for the public
Hijacked aircraft struck the Twin Towers, aviation fuel weakened the steel, and the buildings came down under their own weight. To accept this you must believe that kerosene, which burns at some 800 degrees Celsius, caused structural steel to be not merely weakened but reduced to microscopic dust.
The second truth – for officials
Shared in confidence with senior government figures and allied services: that small nuclear devices, supplied by hostile states, destroyed the towers. This version explains the radiation, the cancers and the molten steel. It was used to justify a war. It blames the wrong people.
The third truth
The buildings were destroyed by their own emergency nuclear demolition scheme – three thermonuclear charges of some 150 kilotons each, placed roughly fifty metres beneath the foundations of WTC-1, WTC-2 and WTC-7 as a condition of the original construction permits, and deliberately detonated. Not smuggled weapons. An existing, authorised system, triggered by men who had been deceived into believing a nuclear device was inside the towers.
What must be explained
1. The site was called "ground zero" from the first day, when the term had one meaning only.
2. Half a million tons of steel were reduced to dust of under 100 microns. No conventional explosive, and no incendiary, pulverises steel.
3. Temperatures beneath the rubble exceeded 1,000 degrees Celsius and persisted for a hundred days. Molten steel was found flowing underground weeks afterwards.
4. Cavities forty feet deep were uncovered in the bedrock, their walls showing every sign of having been melted.
5. Rescue workers developed leukaemia, myeloma and other radiation-specific cancers, in young and healthy people, within a few years. No quantity of asbestos produces that pattern.
6. FBI agents worked the site in full nuclear-biological-chemical protection while firemen and volunteers worked in shirtsleeves.
7. The National Nuclear Security Administration deployed radiological teams to the site. Their remit has nothing to do with dust.
8. NORAD sealed the Cheyenne Mountain blast doors for the first time in history. DefCon Three was declared. The SCATANA plan, written for a Soviet nuclear attack, was put into effect.
9. Aerial thermal surveys revealed three distinct hotspots beneath the site, one under each of the three destroyed buildings.
The pattern
The most unsettling argument in the book is not about the Twin Towers at all. It is that their destruction belongs to a series.
Beirut, October 1983. Two hundred and forty-one American servicemen killed. A photograph taken moments after the blast shows a cloud that conventional explosives do not produce.
New York, February 1993. A bomb beneath the North Tower, explained as fertiliser in a rented van, and a pattern of damage below ground that does not match the explanation.
Oklahoma City, April 1995. A building that failed downwards rather than outwards, seismographs that registered two shocks rather than one, and a man executed three months before September 2001.
New York and Washington, September 2001. Three buildings destroyed, a hole in the Pentagon that no Boeing 757 could have made, and a name applied to the wreckage within hours.
Bali, October 2002. Two hundred and two dead, a crater, a pattern of burns among the survivors, and a network of named perpetrators produced for the world's press with remarkable speed.
Five events. Two decades. One explanation, set out in full in the book.
The man in Bangkok
In April 2001 I was introduced, in Bangkok, to an elderly man living under the name Hadji Mohamed Husseini – an Arabic identity belonging to a man who spoke no Arabic. He travelled on diplomatic papers from more than one state, all in variations of that name, all giving his birthplace as Jerusalem. He was Mike Harari, the longest-serving deputy chief of the Mossad.
For five months we met almost daily. He returned again and again to one subject: nuclear weapons, and what my former Service knew of the demolition scheme built into the World Trade Center.
In late August he pressed a television set on me as a gift, delivering it himself so that it could not be refused at the door. I had not owned a television in thirty years. I have it still, never connected. Its plate carries the date of manufacture: July 2001. A week before the attacks he told me to switch it on for something amusing that was coming. On the 10th of September he advised me to change my dollars into Thai baht, because something bad might happen to the dollar, and soon. On the evening of the 11th he telephoned to say the show had begun. On the morning of the 12th he called me to breakfast an hour early, opened collection wine before eight, and was more delighted by the sight of office workers running than by anything else on the screen.
I record the objection that has been put to me many times since: that a senior intelligence officer may have known an attack was coming, which is not at all the same as having organised it. I do not dismiss it.
But there is a further question, and it is the one I cannot answer. Consider what was arranged. A former officer of the Soviet nuclear-detection service – one of the few men alive who would recognise what the words "ground zero" meant – is befriended by the most notorious Mossad operative in the world, despite forty years of age difference and nothing whatever in common. He is drawn into months of conversation about nuclear weapons and about the demolition scheme beneath the towers. He is given a television and told to watch. He is telephoned when it begins. He is invited to the celebration. And afterwards he is ruined, imprisoned, and left angry enough to write a book.
I was positioned. Someone went to considerable trouble to have a man with precisely my history reach precisely these conclusions, in public. Which leaves the reader with the question I leave open: if I was steered towards the conclusion, does that make the conclusion false – or does it only mean that somebody wanted it told?
Read the book
This page is a summary of a few arguments among many. The full work runs to 1,096 pages, with several hundred footnotes and the documents, photographs and sources on which every claim rests. Six hundred of those pages concern the 11th of September alone.
Please note that although the download is free, the book itself is not free, and the due payment for it is sincerely expected. You may pay by any of the means listed on the donations page.