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Naomi H's avatar

This needs to be more common knowledge. No one even needs to get into the whole "no plane" or "controlled demo" stuff.... just looking at the financial information and erasure is enough for most people with common sense to know there was too much coincidence for it to be coincidental. And then there was the offshoring of wreckage and when forensic recovery specialists tried to piece together hard drives and such from the buildings, there was immense pieces of inside knowledge and advanced knowledge. As well as the put options on certain stocks in the proceeding weeks

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

This comment needs to be higher up.

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Tamara Piety's avatar

But aren’t you saying that I was just reading in some allegation of a conspiracy? Didn’t you tell me that I was incorrectly assuming that “not accidental” = planned by “they”? 😏

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

You’re stuck on the word “they” because you’re treating it like a whodunit—like I’m secretly naming a mastermind without naming them. That’s not what systems analysis is, and it’s not what I’m doing.

“They” doesn’t refer to a hidden cabal.

“They” refers to institutional actors whose incentives converge, whether or not they ever coordinate.

Journalists say “they deregulated the banks” all the time.

Nobody thinks that means five guys in a smoke-filled room.

It means a coalition of agencies, committees, lawyers, and contractors whose interests aligned.

Same here.

When I say “they destroyed the evidence” I’m referring to:

the internal audit apparatus housed in Wedge 1

the external regulatory apparatus housed in WTC 7

the agencies whose investigations evaporated

and the contractors who inherited the oversight vacuum

That’s a structural “they,” not a cinematic one.

Now, about your second concern—why I don’t rush to correct readers who interpret this structurally or conspiratorially.

Because that’s the entire point of breaking a narrative monopoly.

If an official story has held absolute control for 23 years, and people suddenly realize that the placement of those offices, the timing of those announcements, and the systemic beneficiaries don’t line up…

I’m not going to jump in and say:

“Actually, everyone please go back to the narrowest possible interpretation.”

My job is to lay out the pattern with precision.

Their job is to decide what that pattern means.

I’m not here to restore the old narrative boundaries.

I’m here to collapse the illusion that those boundaries were ever neutral.

And frankly, the fact that your mind immediately reinterprets “not accidental” as “secret plot with villains in a boardroom” tells me you’re still trapped in a worldview that can’t process systemic behavior without assigning cartoon motives.

Structural incentives don’t require conspiracies.

Conspiracies don’t require unanimity.

And outcomes can be planned, unplanned, or simply made-use-of after the fact.

But none of that changes the reality:

Two buildings holding the same categories of oversight records vanished on the same day.

You can argue with commenters if you want.

What I’m not going to do is police the reactions of readers who are finally noticing the pattern.

That’s the whole point.

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Mary carol's avatar

What about offsite record storage facilities?

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Offsite storage mattered — but not the way people assume.

Most of DoD’s offsite record facilities only held backups of processed data.

What was destroyed in WTC 7 and the Pentagon’s Wedge 1 wasn’t old paperwork — it was active, ongoing audits.

The Army Budget Office, DFAS, and the Inspector General teams were working on the current-year trail — the stuff that still had signatures, timestamps, and digital logs attached.

Backups can store files.

They can’t store live investigators following the money in real time.

That’s the difference, and that’s why those two buildings mattered.

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Tom Karnes's avatar

The other half of this project is stored off site per ISO9000 guidelines, while records burned in NY, three were copies in Ohio untouched by the fires, and somehow everyone forgot about disaster recovery protocols

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Tom — this would be true if we were talking about manufacturing documentation or corporate QA systems, but ISO9000 doesn’t govern federal investigative case files.

The SEC, IRS-CI, and DoD audit offices in 2001 were still heavily paper-based.

The evidentiary records in WTC 7 and Pentagon Wedge 1 were unique physical files with no complete digital redundancy.

That’s why the SEC publicly admitted that thousands of active cases were delayed or compromised after the destruction of WTC 7.

If there had been robust offsite backups, that wouldn’t have happened.

Corporate disaster-recovery standards and federal evidentiary requirements aren’t interchangeable — especially not in 2001.

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Edward Flynn's avatar

David Martin in a podcast interview described having saved a few key documents from Bldg 7 by digitizing them … that is, doing so was an activity of his company, with apparent access. Was there a limitation at the time on ability of DoD to store digital records? The dependence on paper sounds strange by today’s standards. May be that was always part of the plan.

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Edward Flynn's avatar

Never mind. I just read the prior comment.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

No problem, I'm a cyborg.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Edward — exactly. The pod interview you’re referencing actually reinforces the larger point: digitization in 2001 wasn’t standardized, wasn’t mandated, and wasn’t universal. It depended entirely on which office, which contractor, and which individual happened to be doing the work.

That’s the key distinction.

The DoD, SEC, and IRS-CI weren’t operating on modern cloud infrastructure. They were running mixed environments where:

• some teams had begun experimenting with digital conversion

• others were still 100% paper

• and none had consistent offsite redundancy for classified or compartmentalized material

So when WTC 7 fell, the government didn’t lose “just files.”

It lost the only copies of specific case records that were never fully digitized, plus the institutional memory of the teams working them.

Your example shows how ad hoc the process was. If a company digitized a few documents, it was because an individual contractor or analyst took the initiative — not because the system had robust, standardized digital preservation.

That patchwork is precisely why the losses in WTC 7 and Wedge 1 mattered.

It wasn’t about the “ability” to digitize.

It was about the fact that nobody had built the infrastructure to ensure those records survived a catastrophic hit.

Which, as you said, may not have been an accident.

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Mahwah Azet's avatar

…paper… I’m not an expert but many of the companies had a high speed printers that needed a computer INPUT from somewhere, or perhaps it was linked via internet/email that “hey, I need to print 500K copies of such and such report…. There must be external trail of evidence

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Heather Olivier's avatar

Destruction in plain sight. And he has no respect for ANY norms or rules and as President he wouldn’t be f he would t be questioned about ANYTHING

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Mary carol's avatar

Thank you for clarifying how the offsite back ups worked and how limited they were.

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Nov 28
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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Actually, history disagrees with you.

The SEC publicly admitted that approximately 3,000 active case files were destroyed in the WTC 7 collapse. They were forced to ask the corporations under investigation to voluntarily resubmit copies of the evidence against themselves.

You are applying 2025 cloud logic to 2001 infrastructure. Back then, 'offsite backups' for classified or sensitive compartmentalized intel often didn't exist. The evidence was physical.

Furthermore, you can absolutely stop an audit by eliminating the auditors. The team in Wedge 1 wasn't just holding data; they held the institutional memory of the investigation.

The buildings burned, and the cases did go away. That is a matter of public record.

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Nov 28
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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

"Trust me bro" isn't a good argument, John.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

I’m not arguing about how you think the system should work.

I’m explaining how it actually worked in 2001, based on the agencies' own statements.

If you have a primary source contradicting the SEC’s admissions, feel free to post it.

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Edward Flynn's avatar

Interesting! This looks like an argument with two sides. I am NOT an accountant (a good one makes a lot more $$ than I ever did … although the Pentagon team had a lousy retirement plan). Or a lawyer. But I can pose an opinion for my education. It comes down to enforcement. We see horrendous CRIMINAL offenses dismissed with ever escalating frequency, clear evidence notwithstanding. Who is the judge? When a key witness is killed the day before a criminal trial primary evidence may still exist, but the legal hurdle to rebooting the case can be high. In a white collar crime, can the redundant documentation be recovered? If those responsible say “oh no, we can’t find it!” what happens next is uncertain. Maybe sanctions. Maybe nothing. This issue must have a rich history. In the case of civil corruption, suppose the station wagon with all the evidence in transit to the court is stolen from a diner parking lot. Case closed. That was a true story from Chicago in (Bilandic administration).

As a mere citizen bystander, I think this is a fun and interesting topic, with a lot to learn. That is, apart from the demolition of the United States just narrowly escaped in 2024. I read that $Ts (NOT $Bs) were spent on rigging the 2020 election. Where did those funds come from?

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Mary carol's avatar

Are you proud of being a mere citizen bystander finding information about poor information backup to be amusing? And, despite being offered information on subjects you are only knowledgeable about superficially, you feel compelled to dismiss?

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Nov 29
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Sonja's avatar

Because everyone is a crook.

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Edward Flynn's avatar

Too many who deny the conspiracies don’t know as much as they think they do. The judicial corruption during Biden years was almost unimaginable to most of us. But very real. It did not start overnight.

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Patrice La Belle, M.D.'s avatar

What investigations into foreign entities did the attacks erase?

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

WTC7 didn’t just hold office space — it held federal investigations.

When the building collapsed, the SEC later confirmed that thousands of case files were lost, many of them involving:

• major Wall Street banks

• securities fraud cases

• money-laundering probes

• international transactions tied to offshore entities

To be clear:

the SEC has never publicly listed each foreign target by name.

But what we do know is that the lost cases included:

• investigations into global banking networks

• probes involving foreign shell companies

• cross-border securities fraud

• illicit flows moving through offshore jurisdictions

And those cases weren’t backups on a cloud in 2001 —

much of the evidence existed physically inside WTC7.

So while the U.S. never released a full roster of which foreign entities were involved, the structure of the cases makes it clear:

the collapse erased active investigations into international finance — the kind of probes that trace money across borders.

That’s why the loss mattered so much.

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Patrice La Belle, M.D.'s avatar

That loss is in addition to the thousands who died. One of my friends lost the company and the people she had an interview with. Her interview had originally been scheduled for that day.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

The tragedy is real. This work is in their honor.

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David's avatar

Ethan brother, this is one your most important pieces. Everyone needs to understand this. We've spend so much time focused on the buildings coming down that no one thought to look into what they contained and their function. What the hell is going on?

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Brother… that reaction is exactly why I wrote this series.

For twenty-three years the entire country has been hypnotized by the spectacle — planes, towers, explosions, collapse footage.

Everyone argued about how the buildings fell and nobody ever asked the obvious question:

What was inside those offices?

What vanished with them?

Whose cases, whose ledgers, whose investigations were buried under that smoke?

Once you stop staring at the skyline and start looking at the floor plans, everything changes.

WTC7 wasn’t just “another building.”

It was a vault for fraud cases, SEC archives, FBI investigations, and the infrastructure of financial accountability.

Wedge 1 at the Pentagon wasn’t just “an unlucky office.”

It was the DOD’s audit trail — the exact unit that had just admitted the books were off by trillions.

We weren’t told to look there because if you look there, you stop seeing a “mysterious collapse”

and start seeing an opportunity zone for people who benefitted from losing those records.

That’s the answer to “What the hell is going on?”

The wrong thing collapsed.

The right thing disappeared.

And once you see that pattern — you start noticing the same architecture everywhere.

Keep going through the series.

Episode 3 and 4 show what replaced the missing oversight.

You’re putting the map together exactly how it was meant to be read.

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Shane Yirak's avatar

I wished I were surprised by this, but nothing surprises me anymore.

It turns out that 9/11 was an inside job.

They were willing to kill over 3,000 people to get away with it.

Fuckers.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

All signs point to... yeah... In order to keep things tight with journalistic integrity, I can't say that we have the evidence to verify it entirely.

That being said, when the evidence is controlled by the enemy... this may be the closest we will ever get to proving it. Within a reasonable doubt has new meaning in this context I think. We need to have faith in our ability to recognize patterns. Otherwise, we are vulnerable to their gaslighting.

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Shane Yirak's avatar

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and kills everyone with the evidence to prove massive corruption within the US government.

I don't think there's a line these people won't cross.

Well done, Ethan.

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Tamara Piety's avatar

No shit. As I said “plausible deniability”. You are dishonest. You are trying to tell me that you AREN’T saying what this person and several others clearly think you are saying. Yeah. Lots of journalistic integrity.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

You’re proving the exact psychological pattern I described in The Collapse of Shared Reality.

When an institution loses credibility, people do one of two things:

1. They double down on whatever narrative gives them emotional safety.

2. They slow down, look at the receipts, and separate observation from interpretation.

I’m doing the second.

You’re demanding I do the first.

Here’s the difference:

I report verifiable events — audit offices destroyed, archives lost, case collapses, timing anomalies, contractor overlaps.

You are insisting that describing events is equal to claiming a conspiracy, because your brain is filling in the gaps with its own assumptions. That’s the malfunction. Not the evidence. You’re reacting to a story you are generating, not the one I wrote.

This is exactly how narrative capture works:

when someone can’t distinguish between “this happened” and “here’s who orchestrated it,” they project intention where the text hasn’t made a claim.

You’re not arguing with my article.

You’re arguing with a hallucinated version of it.

The point of my work is to break the institution’s monopoly on interpretation — not to hand you a prepackaged conspiracy theory. If people see patterns in the evidence, that’s because the patterns exist. Not because I inserted them.

And no, correcting misinterpretations isn’t my job here.

Breaking the old frame is.

People will interpret freely once the control narrative fractures. That’s how an information regime collapses.

If you need the world to be simple villains or pure accidents, that’s your coping mechanism — not my claim.

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Laura T RN BSN's avatar

I was on a plane ready to take off. I am still traumatized. So many people died.

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Heather Olivier's avatar

OH MY FUCKING GOD.

So he did remove ALL ACCOUNTABILITY. So that’s it.

We are TOTALLY FUCKED,

without ANY of our history.

I have said before, there’s always a copy. I was WRONG. Our history is now mostly gone, because trump took a wrecking ball to part of the WHITEHOUSE so he could become king

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Hey Heather — I hear the fear underneath this, but just to be clear:

nothing in this piece has anything to do with Trump, Biden, or any modern politician.

The accountability collapse I’m describing happened in 2001–2003, and it came from structural systems — not from any single president, party, or personality.

Your history isn’t gone.

The whole point of this series is showing that the records do exist — they just aren’t where people think they are, and they aren’t guarded by the institutions we assume.

I’m not writing about contemporary politics here.

I’m mapping what actually happened in the early 2000s so we can understand the operating system we live under now.

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Sylvain's avatar

What does Trump have to do with 2001 and using wrecking balls? Youre part of the problem FF.

Trump Trump trump. Give it a break.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Let’s keep this on the work, not on each other.

People process these topics at different speeds, and fear shows up in different ways. That’s normal.

The series is about institutional behavior in 2001–2003.

It’s not about Trump, Biden, or contemporary politics.

If anyone brings those names in, it’s usually because they’re overwhelmed, not because the article is pointing in that direction.

We’re all here to understand the machinery — not fight the culture-war ghosts it throws at us.

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Heather Olivier's avatar

Not part of the problem…just freaking out and overwhelmed. And pissed. I think I was connecting now into our rocky past and trying to make sense of what’s currently happening and t’s actual use of a wrecking ball to the east wing of the WH. Of course trump makes NO SENSE as he is blowing us up.

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Heather Olivier's avatar

Trying to connect then and now

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

I can see the comparison in your mind. Buildings are being destroyed. That makes sense. Trump is in a powerful position, but he is only one man of many elites — and I would argue the ones you don't know the names of are even more dangerous.

The mainstream news does a fantastic job repeating the same politicians name over and over so we forget to look deeper. This goes for both sides. That's why so many people can't look past Trump & Clinton.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

It isn't first nature for most people. We are all adjusting. The fact she is here means she understands this. We can process this for what it is, an opportunity to learn.

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Kelly Donivan's avatar

Please remember that President Trump had nothing to do with 9/11. He is NOT looking to become a "king." As for the ballroom he is having built, he is not destroying history. Our history in not "mostly gone,"but it was never learned to begin with by enough Americans. We have had a corrupt government since before November 22, 1963, when the government killed JFK.

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Heather Olivier's avatar

Dude, t wrecked the WHITEHOUSE, all the HISTORY the destroyed wing housed AND, he still strives to be anointed king in his pathetic state.

PLEASE.

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Kelly Donivan's avatar

No, you are missing context here. I have been around since LBJ, voting since Reagan and I know my history. As for the role, he doesn't want to be a King. Now, the fool behaving like a king is Gavin Newsom. And I am not a "dude."

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Yolanda D.'s avatar

I was living in New York during 9/11, which was the most horrific experience of my life. I was right in the middle of everything! It's hard to believe how completely we were caught off guard. Much information was lost when the Twin Towers collapsed, and this information was not private to the American public. 🙏🏼

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Ambre's avatar

This is a battle in the spiritual war of Satan against God. We can’t bow to evil, but we better seek God’s wisdom to hold the evil at bay. If you understand God’s Word about future events, you know that Satan will win some of the battles of evil against good sacrificing the lives of many people in the process; but God will triumph in the end. Just be sure you know God and are on His side.

Ephesians 6:12-18

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Stand therefore having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.

Above all taking the shield of faith wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God:

praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for the saints

Our Battle Plan given by our Commander, the Lord of Hosts:

TRUTH

RIGHTEOUSNESS

GOSPEL SHARNG

FAITH

SALVATION

GOD’S WORD

PRAYER

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JerryBier's avatar

Keep your fake-ass God out of this --PLEASE! We all would like it to be that simple--but it's not.

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Maree Ann Edgtton's avatar

Thank you for your respectful capital G.🥰

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JerryBier's avatar

I'm an atheist, not a person with no empathy, like some people I know. ;-)

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DavidNichols's avatar

God bless get right with God repent your devilish tounge before you leave this earth . Ambre is 100 percent correct

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JerryBier's avatar

There’s no God. Grow up. Religion is a scam and you’re their mark. Unless you have 100% proof that god exists, and you don’t, you should keep your ignorance private. We don’t want to hear that bullshit.

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Daphne Jones's avatar

I believe what you say, but god helps those who help themselves. This is a free-will dimension. We steer the boat with blessings maybe. We are co-creators. The bible as rewritten by the Hebrews wants us to believe that god will take care of us so we stay inactive and complacent.

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Steve Corey-Steelhorse Patriot's avatar

I have studied 9/11 since the day it happened. Never a doubt about it being an inside job. With that said, I had no idea about the investigation going on inside the Pentagon, and I had no idea if the extent of loss of records in WTC 7! Great work! As always use your discernment all!😉

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Steve Corey-Steelhorse Patriot's avatar

Ethan, the work you are doing is important. Don’t back down to the naysayers!

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Roo’s Views's avatar

Whew how deep does this actually go??!!

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Laura T RN BSN's avatar

Holy Shit

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JerryBier's avatar

If you add in the cost of the Iraqi so-called war, these costs were a lot more, maybe $10 trillion or more.

If anyone witnessed that day as I did, we saw the muted and (to me) the feigned surprise by GWB. That looks different now. He knew. Rumsfield knew. Cheaney knew. But Cheaney took his culpability to the grave. Maybe he left us a confession? Right.

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Abby's avatar

Why then would Rumsfeld even announce there was “money missing”? Why not keep in quiet and destroy the evidence?

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

The announcement wasn’t random — it was strategic.

By September 2001, the Pentagon couldn’t avoid acknowledging the $2.3T in unsupported adjustments. The Inspector General reports were out, congressional pressure was real, and the new audit cycle was scheduled to begin on September 11th. Rumsfeld had to say something before the auditors walked in the next morning.

And when institutions are forced to disclose something damaging, they don’t choose a neutral moment.

They choose the moment that creates the least lasting fallout.

Announcing the problem on September 10th meant:

• the admission was technically on the record

• the audit obligation was triggered

• and yet the fallout window was extremely small

The timing didn’t erase the fact that the next day’s attack destroyed the very offices that held the documentation — but it did ensure that the announcement itself wouldn’t become a multi-week scandal dominating the news cycle.

Institutions don’t just hide bad news.

They time bad news.

When you lay out the sequence, the logic becomes clearer.

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Edgar's avatar

If the announcement triggered the audit obligation, isn’t that what got the auditors back into the buildings’ to be killed, thus ending their knowledge as well?

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

Bingo.

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Tamara Piety's avatar

But how could “they” know this was a “short window” unless they are psychics or the planned it. It’s one or the other.

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Ethan Faulkner's avatar

You keep jumping to “psychics or planners” because you’re treating this like a murder mystery instead of what it is: a systems problem with predictable behavior.

A “short window” doesn’t require psychic powers.

It requires institutional calendar awareness.

The fiscal year ends on September 30.

Year-end audits begin right before that.

Everyone in government knows this—it’s literally on the calendar.

The offices hit (Pentagon Wedge 1 and WTC 7) were the places where those year-end records lived.

That makes it a short window by definition, not by clairvoyance.

Nothing in my article claims the attackers knew that, or that anyone “planned” the audit timing around the attack.

You keep inserting a claim I never made because your mental model can’t process systemic vulnerability without imagining a mastermind behind it.

That’s exactly the phenomenon I described in The Collapse of Shared Reality:

When institutional behavior is predictable, some people interpret it as coincidence,

some interpret it as conspiracy,

but almost nobody can hold the idea of structural inevitability.

You’re stuck in a binary that the real world doesn’t operate on.

“They” = the institutions whose vulnerabilities, calendars, and compartmentalized workflows created a perfect storm—whether the attackers intended it or not.

You don’t need a puppet master when the system is this brittle.

And you don’t need psychics when the deadlines are printed on government paperwork.

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JerryBier's avatar

He knew that it would be gone and upstaged in a matter of hours, which would explain the answer to that.

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Deborah Weaver's avatar

You already know too much…

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Patricia Fehrenbacher's avatar

Wow! It was a horrific event even from afar! At the time I thought who in the world would do such a bastardly thing… now to be enlightened , it’s even more bastardly created! Thanks for the insightful read! And yes GWB’s look that day was so fake, I can almost still see that feigned expressionless smirky face.🤮

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