The Eleventh Day

The Full Story Of 9/11 And Osama Bin Laden

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It is the first full, independent account of the event that traumatized America and the world and stands as a milestone event of the new century.

No one has until now written a comprehensive book on the case. We have dedicated almost five years exclusively to 9/11  -with access for the first time to almost 300 000 of previously withheld documents used in the official probe, and numerous interviews.

“The Eleventh Day is …a house of answers regarding those pesky and unsolved questions surroundingSeptember 11, 2001. Thanks to Summers and Swan we now know the deadly plot should have been thwarted. Did the American government fail the American people? Tragically and sadly, the answer is: yes.”

Jean Sasson, author Growing Up bin Laden

“The Eleventh Day is a game-changer. It is the new definitive timeline for 9/11, a superb and detailed extension of the work of the 9/11 Commission and Congress’ Joint Inquiry. ”

Miles Kara, Professional Staff Congress’ Joint Inquiry & 9/11 Commission

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Featured points

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Though a number of the points below have previously seen coverage in one form or another, only in this book are they analyzed and placed in context with reliable reporting.

The doomed flights

• For the first time, FAA and military air-to-ground transcripts, and the “black box” recording for Flight 93, are used to reconstruct the ill-fated flights of the four hijacked airliners.
• The book shows that it was not only the brave passengers aboard United Flight 93 who were prepared to fight back against the hijackers. On United Flight 175, Brian Sweeney spoke of passengers planning to “storm the cockpit,” and former Israeli commando Daniel Lewin on American 11 – perhaps the first to die on 9/11 and the only passenger known to have been killed before the planes crashed – probably tackled one of the terrorists.

The Twin Towers

• The book draws extensively on the oral histories of firefighters and other first responders, building a moment-by-moment picture of how events unfolded in the first grim hours at Ground Zero.
• It reports on “9/11 sickness,” the sad saga of the respiratory ailments from which so many of those who toiled at the site – told the air was safe to breathe – suffer and continue to die.

The response of President Bush and the U.S. military

• The Eleventh Day has the definitive account of how news of the hijackings reached President Bush, and of his controversial “do nothing, say nothing” initial response.
• With fresh interviews and newly available tape transcripts, the authors document the hours that followed as the nation’s leaders and the military struggled to react. Probably to gloss over the fact that the reaction to the attacks had been chaotic and ineffective, officials then produced an inaccurate version of events.

The conspiracy theorists

• The authors look hard at the conspiracy theories that, courtesy of the Internet, spread like a virus across the world. Boiled down, the theorists’ central thesis is that the Bush administration either mounted the attacks itself or – having received advance intelligence of a coming attack – did nothing to prevent them. 
• The book rebuts a central tenet of conspiracy theory – that the Twin Towers were felled by explosives planted earlier. With the recollections of senior firefighters and official reports, they also debunk the persistent rumor that the collapse of another TradeCenterbuilding – WTC 7 – was explicable only as demolition. Eyewitness accounts and evidence of airplane debris, moreover, put paid to the outlandish notion that the Pentagon was struck not by a hijacked airliner but by a missile.

Who knew what, and when?

• With stunning clarity, the authors analyze one of the great enduring mysteries of the 9/11 story – the fact that the CIA identified two of the terrorists involved almost two years before 9/11, learned that the men had visas to enter the United States – yet kept the information to itself. Why?
• The authors report, with documentary evidence, that – when self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed discussed plans with a key accomplice just months before the attacks – an intelligence agency was listening in.
• The book analyzes the bizarre information – denied by U.S.official sources but supported by a former senior French intelligence official – that Osama bin Laden met secretly with CIA officers only two months before the attacks.
• The Eleventh Day probes the CIA’s treatment of top terrorists seized after 9/11, what the Red Cross calls “torture” and what Bush administration officials preferred to describe as “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Interrogators threatened to kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children.

Hidden from the U.S. public – the true extent of the Saudi connection

• On the record, for the first time, a named former CIA officer states that captured bin Laden operative Abu Zubaydah told Agency questioners that three named members of the Saudi royal family were his associates.
• The book examines claims by two senior Saudi royals, Prince Turki and Prince Bandar, that Saudi intelligence passed advance information on the 9/11 terrorists to the CIA.
• The 9/11 Commission’s contact with Prince Turki, the former Saudi intelligence chief,  is so closely held that it cannot be accessed – or even acknowledged. A rarely used provision in the Freedom of Information Act has been used to ensure total secrecy.
• The book names two senior members of the Saudi royal family – and the government – who reportedly paid bin Laden  “protection money”.
• The book contains the real facts, not fully reported until now, about the way the Bush administration allowed bin Laden family members and other wealthy Saudis to leave the U.S. after 9/11 – some without being even cursorily questioned.
• In connection with Bush and the Saudis, meanwhile, The Eleventh Day publishes a photograph that the former President’s office would prefer to suppress.

The Kingdom And The Towers adapted article from The Eleventh Day
Vanity Fair, August 2011

Who were the hijackers, and why did they do it?

• The Eleventh Day shows how the seeds of the 9/11 attack were sown as early as 1993, when terrorists first tried to bring down the Twin Towers. Ramzi Yousef, the bomber who led the 1993 attack, had described himself as “an emissary from bin Laden.”
• The book has in-depth analysis of a key document that is inexplicably not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. This is the so-called “spiritual manual,” a set of instructions prepared for the hijackers. Three copies were later retrieved – in the unshipped baggage of hijack leader Atta, in a rental car at Dulles Airport, and at the crash site of United Flight 93.
• Interviews and documents accessed by the authors – and the first-ever prison interview with the hijackers’ friend Mounir el-Motassadeq – give readers revealing insights into the personalities of the hijackers and their al Qaeda contacts. The lead terrorists emerge as imperfect but zealous soldiers – as they saw themselves. In the last months and days, knowing they were soon to die, they looked for the comfort of women. Some looked for a wife to take in marriage, in line with their faith, while others sought out prostitutes or dabbled in pornography.