1407 9/11: THE QUESTIONS THEY WOULDN’T ASK—AND THE EMAILS THAT VANISHED

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Richard Syrett's Strange Planet. Following the truth wherever it leads. Exposing evil and corruption and the secret machinations of powerful elites. Revealing the highest strangeness beneath the surface of our supposed reality.

Coming to you from the Great White North and his studio Beneath the Stairs. Here's Richard.

Richard Syrett (2:08)

Hey there and welcome to Strange Planet. We're now just one week away from the 25th anniversary of 9-11, September 11, 2001 25 years. I have to tell you that is a very strange number for me to contemplate because I've been talking about 9-11 and asking questions about 9-11 and most importantly perhaps interviewing people about 9-11 for almost that entire quarter century. In fact, I started asking questions almost immediately when few others in the media were. Just days after the attacks, I was on the air at CFRB AM 1010 in Toronto. And for those of you outside Canada, CFRB is about as mainstream and legacy as Canadian radio gets. 50,000 watts. It's been on the air since 1927, a hundred years. So at the time, this was not some pirate radio station operating out of somebody's basement. This was one of the great powerhouse radio stations in the country and it still is. And I had a Sunday night show. And almost immediately after September 11th, I started asking questions. Questions that to me seemed obvious, but very few others, if any, in the media seem to be asking them or interested in them. And I don't say this to brag. I was just doing my job. I thought that's what broadcasters or journalists are supposed to do when something of enormous historical consequence happens. You ask questions, even uncomfortable ones. Now there was another broadcaster down the dial, named Gary Bell, he was called The Spaceman, and I'm pretty sure Gary was raising many of the same questions. I didn't know Gary back then, so I can't say for certain what he was doing in those first few days. So let's just say I was one of the few.

And you have to understand something about the atmosphere at that time, if you don't remember. America was traumatized. Canada was traumatized. The entire western world was traumatized. Nearly 3,000 people had been murdered. We watched human beings jump from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. We watched two of the most recognizable buildings on the planet disappear in front of our eyes. There was anger and grief and of course fear.

And into that emotional hurricane came an official story. 19 hijackers, 4 airplanes, Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan.

And very quickly anyone who asked whether every piece of that story made sense was suddenly treated as though asking those questions themselves were somehow offensive.

But there were questions, lots of them.

There was the extraordinary story of the passport belonging to alleged hijacker Satama al-Sukami. A passerby reportedly found it near the World Trade Center and turned it over to a police officer. Think about that. An aircraft explodes into a skyscraper. Steel is twisted. Concrete and office contents are pulverized. Thousands of people are killed. The building eventually collapses. And yet we were led to believe a paper passport associated with one of the hijackers survives the impact and ends up on the street.