17.09.2026

Before and after 9/11

Three times as many people have died from the toxic pollution caused by the September 11 2001 attack on the Twin Towers than the attack itself - but other questions remain. Carla Roberts and Alex Maxwell look back 25 years

Mainstream media outlets have focused, understandably, on the ‘human side’ of 9/11 - the almost 3,000 lives lost in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The only slight ‘hiccup’ in the official mourning has come from New York mayor Zohran Mamdani: he released 177,000 pages of official files and documents, which, despite many ‘freedom of information’ requests, until now lay hidden in the city’s vaults. He has allocated $34 million to create and maintain the public records portal, which will see more documents being processed and released, bit by bit, similar to the Epstein files.¹ In the process, Mamdani settled two lawsuits brought by 9/11 Health Watch, which demanded the publication of records concerning the air quality and resulting health problems.

This has become the second tragedy: more than 9,400 people have, so far, died of illnesses that are directly linked to the toxic dust, smoke and debris produced when the twin towers collapsed. The World Trade Center Health Program has certified close to 50,000 cancer cases among responders and survivors.² First responders have been hit particularly hard: for example, while the New York City fire department lost 343 members on 9/11, more than 600 firefighters have died from related illnesses in the decades since.³

This clearly was a cover-up - one of many relating to 9/11. Last week, the CIA itself declassified and published a number of documents, showing how the agency repeatedly warned US presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike at the US. We knew about these warnings generally, but the documents provide an unedited ‘paper trail’, showing exactly how the CIA communicated their growing threat assessments to the White House. At least one of the daily briefings, written weeks after Al Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, warned that bin Laden supporters “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city”, as revenge for the failed attempt by the Clinton administration to kill the Al Qaeda leader with Tomahawk missile strikes.⁴

Unsurprisingly, many people are once again wondering why the four airplanes - on their way to the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the White House - were allowed to fly off-route for up to an hour, without any serious attempt to intercept or stop them? Was there more to it than fuck-ups and a lack of communication?

Was this perhaps similar to the Hamas prison break of October 7 2023, which - as we now know - Benjamin Netanyahu was all too aware of? Last week, Hillary Clinton, of all people, fumed in an interview that “he had been told what was going to happen! He had a warning from [UAE president] Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed”. She then implied that Netanyahu may have wanted the attack to happen: “I don’t know what his thinking was - perhaps he wanted to come down hard.”⁵

The internet is once again awash with various 9/11 conspiracy theories. Many are based on hot air and conjecture, produced by what we might charitably call ‘keyboard warriors’ sitting in their mum’s basement, with too much time on their hands. But of course, the ruling class is conspiring against us every day. And the secrecy, obfuscation and cover-ups around 9/11 have played a part in such theories being dreamed up and being spread once again. We will look at some of them.

War on terror

The biggest question first: Was this really an ‘inside job’ to allow Bush, Blair and co to finally launch their international ‘war on terror’? Didn’t they move suspiciously quickly? After a few short hours Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were publicly named as the culprits. Within two weeks, a CIA paramilitary team was sent into Afghanistan to prepare local anti-Taliban forces and on October 7 2001 the assault proper began. Under the misnamed title, ‘Operation enduring freedom’, this quickly spread to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, west and east Africa and, most recently, Iran.

But already, in early 2000, US-led imperialism was clearly chomping at the bit to assert its role as the only global superpower. 9/11 was certainly used as a pretext to launch further US aggression across the world. Another trigger could and would have been found. World War I would not have been called off, had the 19-year-old Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, missed his target, archduke Franz Ferdinand.

This military aggression went hand-in-hand with a sustained campaign against Palestine movements and civil liberties on the ‘home front’. In Britain, the existing Prevention of Terrorism Act was inadequate for the job in hand - it was mainly aimed at Irish republicans and not really designed to deal with the rising number of groups abroad that were taking action against their respective governments - and were being supported by an increasing range of Islamic individuals and outfits in Britain.

Tony Blair demanded more restrictive legislation to criminalise opposition to the wars against Afghanistan and then Iraq. The legislation has been amended a number of times over the last 25 years to suit the changing needs of the government - most recently in 2021, when section 12(1A) was added, which specifically outlaws “support for a proscribed organisation” - clearly with the aim of targeting pro-Palestine supporters, including those holding up placards.⁶ Similar legislation has been introduced in the US and many other countries.

We have also seen the coordinated attempt to change the definition of anti-Semitism: 25 out of 27 EU member-states have officially adopted or endorsed the so-called “working definition of anti-Semitism” published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; globally, it is 47 countries, including the USA. As the Weekly Worker has pointed out many times, it does not actually define anti-Semitism (which is discrimination against or hatred of Jewish people). Instead, it lists 11 examples, which effectively label criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. This is very much part and parcel of a wider, international strategy of intimidation and criminalisation of all those critical of Israel and the ‘war on terror’ conducted by US imperialism.

Unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, Saudi Arabia was never in the crosshairs of US-imperialism - despite the fact that Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Clearly, a section of the Saudi royal family has been involved in supporting and financing the attacks - an angle the BBC in particular has been pushing. But a US lawsuit by a group of the 9/11 families against the Saudi Arabian authorities has been repeatedly kicked into the long grass. A number of Saudi prisoners who have spent years incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay for their alleged roles on 9/11 have just been given a “tentative” trial date of June 2028 - ie, 27 years after the event! If it ever goes ahead, it would be in conditions of strict secrecy.

Clearly, the US administration is not keen to hold Saudi Arabia to account. Not only is it a key political and economic partner of the US in the unstable Middle East: it is an important ally in the US war against Iran. In July 2026, the US state department approved an additional $2 billion weapons package to Saudi Arabia, aimed at “protecting global energy supply lines”, including the Strait of Hormuz.

A closer investigation into Saudi Arabia’s role would also shine a light on the murky role the US administration played in effectively helping to create Al Qaeda in the first place. From 1979 until 1992, the CIA channelled billions of dollars into recruiting and training Afghan mujahideen fighters in order to oppose the Soviet presence in Afghanistan via its ‘operation cyclone’. Bin Laden - a member of an independently wealthy Saudi family - set up his own group, MAK. He soon acted as a liaison between the mujahideen warlords and the Saudi general intelligence presidency (GIP). He became something of a regional key player and, when he led his men against the Soviets in the 1987 Battle of Jaji, his status as an Islamic hero was cemented. He founded Al Qaeda in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in August 1988, bringing together various ‘Afghan-Arab’ fighters who had come to Afghanistan to drive out the communist infidels. This is all well-known, but the US administration lost interest once the Soviet army withdrew north in February 1989.

Free-fall collapse

There have been multiple theories explaining the fact that, very unusually, the World Trade Centers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed with almost free-fall speed in 9 to 11 seconds - something that usually only happens in a controlled demolition.

When a tall building collapses, there are two main scenarios. The first and most common is a failure towards the top of the structure, whereby some element of structure or floor levels fail in some way, but the lower levels remain structurally viable and halt any further collapse by picking up the work of the failed element, using spare capacity or redundancy.

The second scenario - a failure towards the base of the structure or the building foundations - is more serious. But, even when these ‘base’ collapses occur, they are normally only partial, as the other supports take the additional load. The upper floors essentially remain intact, which is known as ‘pancaking’: floors are stacked on top of each other. The foundations of the WTC towers were supported by granite bedrock - arguably the most secure foundation.

Structural engineers avoid single points of failure and the WTC towers were also designed for vehicle impacts (including the possibility of the then biggest commercial plane, a Boeing 707, being flown into it). For a building to collapse as they did on 9/11 there must be a complete failure of the structural system. This means that the structural elements or connections between those elements which are collectively performing the job of resisting gravitational forces, all fail and then gravity instantly takes over.

The two official US government reports, produced by its National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),⁷ explained this by the unusual and innovative structural system employed in the WTC towers, which was then exacerbated by the absence or degradation of the fire protection system: the airplane impact ‘knocked off’ the fire protection, contributing to a weakening of the structure of the floors affected by the fires.

Whilst the first part of this explanation is plausible, many structural engineers remain unconvinced that the fires could be responsible for the collapse of the entire towers in 9 to 11 seconds. Such a scenario would involve a near-simultaneous failure of all connections on all floor levels, including those unaffected by fire. It also does not explain why WTC 7 collapsed in the same way, although there was no plane crashing into it.

These anomalies have led to a number of wild speculations. Going furthest is the theory that ‘somebody’ planted small nuclear detonation charges at the bases of the towers, which would explain how the steel in the buildings turned to dust. There are naturally a number of other possibilities that could explain the free-fall speed, including that the towers might have been built with substandard materials or various other short cuts.

The various conspiracy theories thrive on the fact that there had been no independent forensic examination of the crash site, unlike after a plane crash, where debris has to be preserved and re-examined many times. No outside, independent team was ever given unrestricted access to examine the steelwork. The majority of the steel was quickly cut up and shipped for recycling. There has also been no independent peer review of the official NIST reports and they have never been subject to a public inquiry or congressional hearing.

While we do not believe that 9/11 was a set-up or an inside job, it is quite legitimate to demand full transparency on all such matters. For a start, they would help avoid our movement being sidetracked by the more fantastic conspiracy theories.

nyc.gov/sept11docs.↩︎
abc7news.com/live-updates/911-25th-anniversary-ceremony-updates-families-gather-world-trade-center-pentagon-shanksville-pennsylvania/19811366.↩︎
www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-mark-25-years-since-september-11-attacks-amid-enduring-grief-2026-09-11.↩︎
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/previously-classified-911-documents-released-cia-25th-anniversary-atta-rcna597262.↩︎
www.youtube.com/shorts/o2HQKMzbTkU.↩︎
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/12.↩︎
‘Federal building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center disaster: final report of the National Construction Safety team on the collapses of World Trade Center towers’, NIST NCSTAR 1, September 2005; plus follow-up report on the collapses of ‘building 7’, NIST NCSTAR 1A, November 2008.↩︎