The questions everyone asks have answers. The ones nobody asks don't.

He did write it. But the World Trade Center had already been bombed in 1993 by Ramzi Yousef, who was explicitly trying to topple one tower into the other. Predicting a second attack on a landmark that had just been attacked, in a book about terrorism, is not foreknowledge — it is the most obvious example available to any author writing in 1995.^[10]

The exact line from Rebuilding America's Defenses (p.51): the process of transformation "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor."^[11] Read it again: it is a complaint that military transformation will be slow without a crisis. It is not a plan to manufacture one, and reading it as a confession requires ignoring the sentence's grammar.

What survives is still worth your attention. Ten of the twenty-five signatories of PNAC's founding statement — Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz among them — took office in the Bush administration.^[11] They wanted a specific transformation, they said openly it would need a catalysing shock, the shock arrived, and they got the transformation. You do not need them to have caused it to notice they were ready.

There was a long-running elevator modernization programme at the towers. The insinuation is that it gave access to plant explosives. There is no evidence of that — no witness from a large unionised workforce, no procurement trail, no physical residue in the debris. A skyscraper maintaining its elevators is a skyscraper maintaining its elevators.

Larry Silverstein took a 99-year lease on the complex in July 2001, roughly six weeks before the attacks, and litigated afterwards over whether the strikes counted as one insured event or two. Genuinely striking timing, and genuinely enormous sums. But commercial property is always insured — a lease without insurance is not a thing that exists — and years of litigation is what you get, not a windfall. As for the "pull it" remark about WTC 7: preparing a 47-storey building for controlled demolition takes weeks of drilling, charge placement and structural stripping, in a building that was on fire and unreachable all day.

This one is a genuine document. The DEA's Office of Security Programs compiled a 60-page internal report in June 2001 on young Israelis posing as art students who repeatedly attempted to enter DEA and other federal facilities across the US.^[12] Dozens were later arrested on immigration charges and deported without espionage charges being brought.^[13] Officials have variously called it an intelligence operation and an aggressive sales scam. What it is not is established evidence of any connection to the September 11 plot — no investigation has ever drawn that link. File it as: something real happened here, and the public explanation has never been convincing.

Important: this is a different matter from the "BB18" photographs, which are frequently presented as the same story. They are not. See immediately below.

A viral image shows a young man stacking cardboard boxes stencilled "BB 18" inside the Twin Towers, captioned: Israeli "art students" working in the Twin Towers before 9/11 — why did they need so many BB18 explosive fuse holders?^[17] It is a good example of a claim that survives only if nobody checks either half of it. Both halves fail.

They were not Israeli. The photographs are of Gelitin (then Gelatin), an Austrian art collective from Vienna. In March 2000 — eighteen months before the attacks — they held a legitimate studio residency on the 91st floor of the North Tower through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Views programme. The boxes were stacked to hide what they were building: "The B-Thing," a small balcony they briefly bolted outside a removed window.^[18] The nationality was swapped to graft this onto the separate DEA matter above.

A BB18 is not an explosive anything. It is a stock catalogue part: the Littelfuse POWR-GARD BB18, a three-phase busbar terminal power feed lug rated 115 A at 600 V AC, sold openly today by electrical wholesalers for connecting power cables to LPSM/LPSC fuse holders.^[19] It is a lump of metal that joins a cable to a fusebox. You can buy one right now for the price of a sandwich.

The entire claim rests on the word "fuse" meaning two unrelated things — an electrical fuse protects a circuit by melting; a blasting fuse detonates a charge — and on the hope that you will not look up the part number printed in the photograph. That is not a smoking gun. It is a pun, performed on people who were told it was evidence.

Five Israeli nationals working for Urban Moving Systems were seen filming and reacting to the attacks from New Jersey, detained, held for around 71 days, and deported. All true, and two were later assessed as having possible intelligence links.^[14]

But the entire force of the story is the suggestion that they were positioned in advance — and that is where it dies. FBI records place them arriving at the observation point between 8:50 and 9:03 a.m. The first plane hit at 8:46.^[14] They got there after it happened, which is consistent with their own account of leaving the office when they heard an explosion. If some of them were Israeli intelligence assets operating in the US, that is its own scandal about a supposed ally — but it is not evidence they knew what was coming.

The unusual put-option volume on United and American was real, and it was chased down. The 9/11 Commission and the SEC traced 95% of the UAL puts to a single US institutional investor with no conceivable link to al-Qaeda, whose same trading strategy bought 115,000 shares of American Airlines on 10 September — a position that would be destroyed by an attack.^[15] Someone with foreknowledge does not buy the airline they know is about to be hijacked. Every anomalous trade examined turned out to have an innocuous explanation.

Both are handled in section I. Neither survives contact with the record.

Signed 26 October 2001: 342 pages of surveillance and detention powers, passed six weeks after the attacks, with members voting on a text almost none of them had read. Much of it was not written in response to 9/11 at all — it recycled provisions that Congress had previously considered and declined to pass. The crisis did not produce the wish list. It produced the opportunity to enact one that already existed. That is the mechanism the viral list keeps gesturing at and never names.

General Wesley Clark has said, consistently and on the record — in a 2007 interview and in his memoir — that weeks after 9/11 a Pentagon officer showed him a memo describing a plan to "take out seven countries in five years": Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.^[16] The document itself has never been produced or declassified, so this rests entirely on one man's account, and it should be labelled that way.

What is not in dispute is what happened next to that list of countries. Take Clark's account as unverified — it is — and the subsequent quarter-century remains a matter of public record.