As the 14^th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it’s important to remind people that we still don’t know what happened that day. What is known about 9/11 is that there are many incredible facts that continue to be ignored by the government and the mainstream media. Here are fourteen.

1. An outline of what was to become the 9/11 Commission Report was produced before the investigation began. The outline was kept secret from the Commission’s staff and appears to have determined the outcome of the investigation.
2. The 9/11 Commission claimed sixty-three (63) times in its Report that it could find “no evidence” related to important aspects of the crimes.
3. One person, Shayna Steiger, issued 12 visas to the alleged hijackers in Saudi Arabia. Steiger issued some of the visas without interviewing the applicants and fought with another employee at the embassy who tried to prevent her lax approach.
4. Before 9/11, the nation’s leading counter-terrorism expert repeatedly notified his friends in the United Arab Emirates of top-secret U.S. plans to capture Osama bin Laden. These treasonous leaks prevented Bin Laden’s capture on at least two separate occasions.
5. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was caught stealing documents from the National Archives that had been requested by the 9/11 Commission. The Commission had previously been denied access to the documents but the White House reluctantly agreed to turn them over just as Berger was trying to steal them..
6. The official story of the failed air defenses on 9/11 was changed several times and, in the end, paradoxically exonerated the military by saying that the military had lied many times about its response. The man who was behind several of the changing accounts was a specialist in political warfare (i.e. propaganda).
7. Military exercises being conducted on the day of 9/11 mimicked the attacks as they were occurring and obstructed the response to the attacks. NORAD commander Ralph Eberhart sponsored those exercises, failed to do his job that day, and later lied to Congress about it (if the 9/11 Commission account is true).
8. A third skyscraper collapsed late in the afternoon on 9/11. This was WTC 7, a 47-story building that the government’s final report says fell into its own footprint due to office fires. The building’s tenants included U.S. intelligence agencies and a company led in part by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Meetings were scheduled there to discuss terrorism and explosives on the morning of 9/11.
9. News agencies, including BBC and CNN, announced the destruction of WTC 7 long before it happened. One BBC reporter announced the collapse while viewers could see the still-standing building right behind her in the video. Years later, after claiming that it had lost the tapes and then found them again, BBC’s answer to this astonishing report was that everything was just “confusing and chaotic” that day. Of course, one problem with this is that the news agencies predicted the exact building, of the many damaged in the area, that would collapse. Another big problem is that no one could have possibly predicted the collapse of WTC 7 given the unprecedented and unbelievable official account for how that happened.
10. Construction of the new, 52-story WTC 7 was completed two years before the government knew what happened to the first WTC 7. In fact, when the new building was completed in 2006, the spokesman for the government investigation said, “We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.” The construction of the new building, without regard for how the first one was destroyed, indicates that building construction professionals in New York City did not believe it could ever happen again.
11. Ultimately, building construction codes were not changed as a result of the root causes cited by the National Institute for Standards and Technology for destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings. This fact shows that the international building construction community does not believe that the WTC buildings were destroyed as stated in the official account.
12. AMEC, the company that just finished rebuilding the exact spot where Flight 77 was said to hit, was put in charge of cleanup at the WTC and the Pentagon. The man who ran the company, Peter Janson, was a long-time business associate of Donald Rumsfeld.
13. The response of the U.S. Secret Service to the 9/11 attacks suggests foreknowledge of the events in that the agency failed to protect the president from the obvious danger posed by terrorists.
14. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission notified the FBI of suspected 9/11 insider trading transactions. That evidence was ignored and the suspects were not even questioned by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission.

There are, of course, many more incredible facts about 9/11 that continue to be ignored by authorities and much of the media. Let’s hope that the next major terrorist attack results in legitimate reporting and unified calls for truth before fourteen years have passed.

In The Al Qaeda Network: A New Framework For DefiningThe Enemy, Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute describes the terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. Zimmerman is seen as a leading expert on the Al Qaeda network, having testified about it to Congress and written about it for The Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, and the Huffington Post.

In her analysis, Zimmerman identified the geographical locations of the groups said to be within the Al Qaeda network. These locations outline an area encompassing parts of Northern Africa and all of the Middle East. This region, in which the entire Al Qaeda network is based, represents about 15% of the total land on planet earth.

What is special about this land that might lead its inhabitants to a life of terrorism? Some, including Zimmerman, say that this region correlates to the land of Islam and that therefore the correlation is simply an indication that Muslims are prone to terrorism.

However, the known distribution of the world’s population of Muslims does not support that contention. According to the Pew Research Center, only about 55% of the world’s Muslims live inside the Al Qaeda network region.

The other possibility is that, since the area is rich in untapped resources, powerful people have used claims of terrorism as a pretext to invade. That possibility is definitely supported by evidence. For example, ten years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, U.S. officials began openly admitting that the war in Iraq was motivated by the desire to seize oil. U.S. military leaders including General John Abizaid, head of the U.S. military in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel have said that the war was about oil. Even former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted it.

Geographical correlation also supports this possibility much better. When the region outlined by Zimmerman’s Al Qaeda network is superimposed on a map of oil reserves by country, over 70% of the world’s oil reserves fall within the same area.

Last year, it was discovered that the FBI had attempted to infiltrate the legal defense team of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. The defendant is charged, along with four others including Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), of conspiring to commit the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the military trial was moved out for approximately one year to allow for an investigation into the FBI’s offense. Recently, Al-Jazeera reported that the trial has been moved out yet again because the Department of Justice team leading the investigation (of its own bureau) needs more time to complete its secret report. These delays highlight the absurdity of the case against these men and the contemptible abuse of justice that the military trial represents.

Apparently, it has been difficult for the Justice Department to explain why the FBI approached a member of defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s legal team to “create a relationship with him that he was forbidden from disclosing.” That explanation became more difficult when it was learned that another member of Bin al-Shibh’s defense team had been cooperating with the FBI since late 2013.