Author Disputes Official Story of 9/11 Terror Attacks, Then Winds Up Dead In the California Desert

9/11 author Phillip Marshall,
with his children

The author of a recent book that questions the official story of 9/11 was found dead earlier this month--along with his teen-age son and daughter and the family dog--at their home in the desert community of Murphys, California.

Authorities concluded that Phillip Marshall and the other victims died on February 2 from a murder-suicide. But a prominent investigative journalist recently visited Calaveras County, spoke to many of Marshall's neighbors and friends, and found powerful reasons to doubt the official finding.

Marshall published The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror in 2012. But Wayne Madsen, based in Washington, D.C., reports that Marshall was working on a new 9/11 book that might have contributed to his death.

Madsen's full three-part series is available via subscription at Wayne Madsen Reports (WMR). We have received permission to quote from the report. At a post titled "A Black Ops Hit Made to Appear as a Suicide," Madsen writes:

Philip Marshall, the retired United Airlines pilot, 9/11 analysis author, and one-time Iran-contra era associate of CIA/DEA informant Barry Seal, did not shoot his two teen-age children and himself. That is the conclusion of everyone who knew Marshall after he moved to the Sierra Nevadas community of Murphys ten years ago after he sold his home in Santa Barbara. Friends said Marshall was looking for more seclusion. 

Marshall, who believed that the Bush family, allied with Saudi and neo-conservative interests, pulled off the 9/11 attack to engineer a government coup d'etat, was working on a fourth book that promised to reveal some new blockbuster information.

The Santa Barbara View apparently was first to raise questions about Marshall's death. From a February 6 piece titled "Phillip Marshal Wrote About Conspiracies; Was He the Victim of One?"

Former airline pilot Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall spent a great deal of time around Santa Barbara last year preparing for the release of his controversial 9/11 conspiracy book “The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror.”

During the editing and pre-marketing process of Marshall’s book, he expressed some degree of paranoia because the nonfiction work accused the George W. Bush administration of being in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence community in training the hijackers who died in the planes used in the attacks.

“Think about this,” Marshall said last year in a written statement, “The official version about some ghost (Osama bin Laden) in some cave on the other side of the world defeating our entire military establishment on U.S. soil is absolutely preposterous.”

Marshall went on to say: “The true reason the attack was successful is because of an inside military stand-down and a coordinated training operation that prepared the hijackers to fly heavy commercial airliners. We have dozens of FBI documents to prove that this flight training was conducted in California, Florida and Arizona in the 18 months leading up to the attack.”

What was the result of Marshall's research on 9/11? Here is how he put it in writing to Santa Barbara View:

“After an exhaustive 10-year study of this lethal attack that used Boeing airliners filled with passengers and fellow crew members as guided missiles, I am 100 percent convinced that a covert team of Saudi intelligence agents was the source of logistical, financial and tactical resources that directed essential flight training to the 9/11 hijackers for 18 months before the attack,” Marshall wrote. “This conclusion was determined six years ago, and all subsequent evidence has only served to confirm this conclusion.”

Marshall was not alone in that assessment. Reports Santa Barbara View:

On March 1, two former U.S. senators, who headed separate 9/11 federal investigations, also raised the possibility of Saudi involvement in the attacks that killed 3,000 people and spurred the global War on Terror. In sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, former senators Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey, who saw top-secret information on the Saudis’ activities, said they believe that the Saudi government played a direct role in the terrorist attacks.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” former Senator Bob Graham said in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country by families of 9/11 victims and others. Graham headed a 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks and has claimed he was muzzled into silence about his committee’s findings in 2002 by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other top members of the Bush intelligence community.

In his own sworn affidavit, Kerrey said “significant questions remain unanswered” about the role of Saudi institutions. “Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the (9/11) attacks has never been fully pursued,” Kerrey said in a March 1, 2012, New York Times article.

Madsen's on-site reporting produced a number of reasons to question the murder-suicide finding:

Neighbors and friends of Marshall contradicted a number of Calaveras County Sheriff's Department findings about what they quickly concluded was a murder-suicide by a crazed killer. Furthermore, one close professional colleague of Marshall believed a federal "black ops" team prevailed upon the Sheriff's Department to come up with the rapid murder-suicide explanation.

WMR learned from a local media source in Calaveras County that Sheriff Gary Kuntz is dragging his feet on providing local newspapers with two critical reports: the toxicological report on Marshall's and his son's and daughter's bodies and the GSR (Gunshot Residue) report on the bullets fired from what was reported to be Marshall's 9 mm Glock, which neighbors reported was never loaded.

Where is the Marshall investigation headed? It might be too early to say, but Madsen reports that the official story seems to contain a number of holes:

The Sheriff . . . stated that no gunshots were heard by neighbors on the evening of January 31 or early morning of February 1 because the houses are far apart. In fact, the houses are extremely close together and one neighbor stated she could "hear Phil whistling from inside his house." Police immediately denied that a silencer or other noise suppression device could have been used in the four shootings that included single shots each to Marshall, son Alex, daughter Macaila, and Shih-tzu dog "Suki," the latter found in a bedroom. One neighbor reported hearing an unusual noise during the evening of January 31, a Thursday.