One of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts this year says he thinks the September 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job.
Bob Antonellis, a Republican from Medford, one of three Republicans vying for the GOP nomination, has made this claim.
“Washington is stealing our liberty and freedoms, systematically, even Demonically,” Antonellis wrote on his campaign web site. “9/11 as an ‘inside job’, we’ll be talking more about Harvard’s role in that, it was done, in part, to get American Patriots to support the Patriot Act, which forces Americans to nearly undress, just to get on a plane, and legalized spying on everyone.”
Though the Transportation Security Administration (also known as the TSA) was established in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was not due to the Patriot Act. The federal Aviation and Transportation Security Act, signed into law by then-President George W. Bush, a Republican, in November 2001, created the agency. But as Antonellis’s web site states, it was a post-September 11 measure.
On September 11, 2001, 2,996 people were killed by radical Islamic terrorists who hijacked four airplanes and committed several attacks. Terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 out of Logan Airport in Boston and crashed them into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, destroying the buildings. Another airplane crashed into the Pentagon in northern Virginia, significantly damaging the building. A fourth airplane crashed in rural Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, after passengers rushed the hijackers.
The attacks killed 206 people who either lived in Massachusetts or were from Massachusetts, as NewBostonPost has previously reported.
U.S. intelligence quickly determined that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, was the mastermind behind the attack. Bin Laden later admitted being the mastermind of the attack in a 2004 video obtained by Al Jazeera.
But Antonellis doesn’t accept the federal government’s explanation or bin Laden’s admission.
Antonellis expressed support for the September 11 conspiracy theory in a February 2016 YouTube video.
In it, he cited former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s past statements that he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey the day before September 11 as evidence that the terrorist attacks were an inside job.
“And on that day, September the 10th, I learned during the Republican debates, Chris Christie was nominated to be the Attorney General – or the federal attorney to New Jersey – on that day, and I think that was Bush down there doing his, whatever you want to call it, pre-9/11 planning or planning for post-9/11,” Antonellis said in the video. “That was the day he did that.”
Bush didn’t formally nominate Christie for the post until December 2001, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him that same month. However, the Newark Star-Ledger reported on September 11, 2001, that Christie spoke privately with the Bush administration about taking the position on September 10, 2001, according to Politifact.
Antonellis is running for U.S. Senate in the GOP primary against Quincy City Council president Ian Cain and cryptocurrency lawyer John Deaton. The primary is scheduled for Tuesday, September 3, though early voting has already begun.
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