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FILMMAKERS NOTEBOOK 141
ZELIKOW'S PARALLEL UNIVERSE
- part 2
Zelikow, author of the 9/11 Commission Report, responds to a couple of uncensored questions August 9, 2007 at Chautauqua Institution. Question 1 comes from Paul
Zarembka, editor of The Hidden History of 9-11-2001. Professor
Zarembka, State University of New York at Buffalo (Economics Dept), asks Zelikow why he failed to investigate reports of several of the so-called hijackers alive and protesting their non-involvement. Then yor yevrah of snowshoefilms asks Zelikow about Building 7. Zelikow says he doesn't accept the hypothesis that any buildings were brought down by controlled demolition.
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TRANSCRIPT: Philip Zelikow’s parallel universe
snowshoefilms
(SOUND UNDER OPENING CREDITS)
Philip Zelikow’s voice
“If the 9/11 attacks were carried out by something other than the hijackers – and there’s a whole alternative universe – in which the attacks occurred in a completely different way, yeah. If we lived in a parallel universe, that would be a very different universe. There’s, in our view, not a lot of evidence that universe is actually connected to this one.”
TWO QUESTIONS
First Question
Paul Zarembka (Professor, economics, State University of New York, Buffalo): Could I ask a question? Do you mind?
Zelikow’s handler: If you keep it … keep it quick, though …
Zarembka: The 9/11 Commission didn’t deal with any of the hijackers except to name them but never addressed the question, like up to 11 were alive after 9/11, reported by BBC, The Independent, LA Times and stuff like that. Why didn’t you interrogate all that issue of the hijackers being alive after 9/11?
NO THERE THERE
Zelikow: Um, we actually, uh, looked into those allegations and I think if you actually dig into the underlying data underneath the citations you’ve heard about, uh, there’s no there, there. Uh, uh, the hijackers did not survive those plane crashes. And we know a lot about the hijackers; we’ve actually, uh, uh, there’s quite a lot about them in the Report. Not only did we have a lot of information about them from the people who were alive and captured, which we quote in the Report, but the Saudi government and others actually talked to their families, and uh, uh, believe me, none of their families have heard from them since 9/11.
Zarembka: Well, that’s not true…
Zelikow: None of their families think they’re alive…
Zarembka: That’s not true, okay…
Zelikow: You may have better information than we did but I think our information is pretty good.
Zarembka: Well, anyway, you didn’t report any of it. That’s the bottom line. You didn’t interrogate that issue. That’s the key issue. You just took the list that was publicized, and basically the whole world is changing on the basis of your statement that 19 people did this operation. And if it’s false, okay, that has major implications for how the world should be going forward. You follow what I’m saying?
A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Zelikow: Yeah, sure, if, if the, if the 9/11 attacks were carried out by something other than the hijackers, and there’s a whole alternative universe in which the attacks occurred in a completely different way, yeah. If we lived in a parallel universe that would be a very different universe. There’s, uh, in our view, not a lot of evidence that that universe is actually connected to this one.
Zarembka: I’m just saying, you should have interrogated that in the Commission Report, but you didn’t, at all.
SUSTAINING THE NARRATIVE WE WANTED TO PROVIDE
Zelikow: No, there are actually about 2,000 allegations of this kind of which we saw a lot and we didn’t try to knock down every… we took on a few of the most important ones in the Report, but there are so many incredible allegations of this kind, that we did not... it would have taken us hundreds of pages in the Report, which was already a pretty long report, and say here’s why that’s… here’s why that’s bogus, here’s why that’s bogus, here’s why that’s bogus and we could have gone on like that for a long time. But we didn’t do that because, uh, then what would have happened is, we couldn’t have sustained the narrative and the kind of report we wanted to provide. So we covered a lot of those bases and there’s a vast body of information underneath our Report that’s not in the Report. We, I mean we interviewed thousands of people and looked at millions of pages of documents and a lot of the… The Report is just the tip of the iceberg of the work that we did.
Zarembka: Right, but you…
Zelikow: We responded to questions actually of, of, that… 9/11 families gave to us about a lot of different conspiracy theories, stock market manipulation, other allegations and, but, the theories regenerate and take new forms depending on whatever, whatever you say, once you disprove one version of it, it just mutates into another version of it…
Zarembka: But you didn’t prove your own version. The problem is that you didn’t prove your own version.
Zelikow’s handler: Sir, sir, we need to get going…
Second Question
Snowshoefilms: Mr. Zelikow…why…. why wasn’t Building 7…. Why wasn’t Building 7 part of your Report? Why didn’t, I mean, 6.5 seconds, apparent controlled demolition, why didn’t the Commission mention, even, and investigate, especially Building 7’s 6.5 second, a 47-story building…
Zelikow: There’s an enormous engineering study that’s by the National Institute for Standards and Technology that was actually done on the collapse of the World Trade Center and the engineering aspects of the attack. But we don’t actually believe that there is a kind of controlled demolition scenario that, that you hypothesize.
CUT TO DAN RATHER’S VIDEO AND NARRATION OF BUILDING 7 COLLAPSING (29 seconds)
Zelikow (cont.): We don’t find any, uh, persuasive, affirmative evidence that that scenario actually is true.
CUT TO LARRY SILVERSTEIN CLIP (23 seconds)
Zelikow (cont. / dif. camera angle/ repeat): But we don’t actually believe that there is a kind of controlled demolition scenario that… that you hypothesize.
CUT TO BUILDING 7 CONTROLLED DEMOLITION CLIP WITH FIREMEN WATCHING: “It’s gone, man.”
Zelikow (cont. / 2nd camera angle/repeat): We don’t find any, uh, persuasive, affirmative evidence that that scenario actually is true.
CUT TO CNN CLIP (13 seconds) showing Building 7’s collapse, with narration: “This is no small building as you can see. At 47 stories, it would stand out in most American cities…”
Snowshoefilms: But 6.5 seconds, it dropped in 6.5 seconds. How do you account for that when it wasn’t hit by a plane
(exit, Zelikow)
CREDITS ROLE OVER ZELIKOW EXIT, SLOW MOTION
REPEAT ZELIKOW’S ‘PARALLEL UNIVERSE’ OBSERVATION.
Professor Paul Zarembka, State University of New York at Buffalo, is the editor of The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, Elsevier, 2006. Transcript by yor yevrah, snowshoefilms; with emendations and thanks to Paul Zarembka. Video filmed Aug 9, 2007, Chautauqua Institute (TRT: 7 min 40 sec)
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