SEPTEMBER 11 2001 :
THE CRIMES OF WAR COMMITTED IN THE NAME OF 9/11
http://www.globalresearch.ca/september-1...11/5311561
The following text was presented at the International Conference on “9/11 Revisited – Seeking the Truth”, Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), Kuala Lumpur
Introduction
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point.
Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 era is marked by the outright criminalization of the US State, including its judicial, foreign policy, national security and intelligence apparatus.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
In assessing the crimes associated with 9/11 in the context of a legal procedure, we must distinguish between those associated with the actual event, namely the loss of life and the destruction of property on 9/11, from the crimes committed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 “in the name of 9/11?.
The latter build upon the former. We are dealing with two related dimensions of criminality. The crimes committed “in the name of 9/11? involving acts of war are far-reaching, resulting in the deaths of millions of people as well as the destruction of entire countries.
The 9/11 event in itself– which becomes symbolic– is used to justify the onslaught of the post 9/11 US-NATO military agenda, under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), not to mention the ushering in of the Homeland police state and the repeal of civil liberties.
The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 broadly consist in two intimately related processes:
1. The launching of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification to Wage a War of Conquest. This GWOT mandate was used to justify the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The GWOT mandate has since extended its grip to a large number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the US and its NATO allies are intervening selectively under a counterterrorism mandate.
2. The derogation of civil liberties and the instatement of an Orwellian police state apparatus within Western countries. In the US, the introduction of the PATRIOT legislation and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks set the stage for the subsequent restructuring of the judicial and law enforcement apparatus, culminating in the legalization of extrajudicial assassinations under an alleged counter-terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks constitute what is referred to in intelligence parlance as a “massive casualty producing event” conducive to the deaths of civilians.
The dramatic loss of life on the morning of 9/11 resulting from an initial criminal act is used as a pretext and a justification to wage an all out war of retribution, in the name of 9/11 against the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, namely the “state sponsors of terrorism”, including Afghanistan, Iraq as well as Iran.
We are dealing with a diabolical and criminal project. The civilian deaths resulting from the 911 attacks are an instrument of war propaganda, applied to build a consensus in favor of an outright war of global domination.
The perpetrators of war propaganda are complicit in the conduct of extensive war crimes, in that they readily justify acts of war as counter-terrorism and/or humanitarian operations (R2P) launched to protect civilians. The “Just War” (Jus ad Bellum) concept prevails: The killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq are “rightfully” undertaken in retribution for the deaths incurred on 9/11.
Evidence is fabricated to the effect that the “state sponsors of terrorism” had committed, on the morning of 9/11, an outright act of war against the United States.
Realities are turned upside down. The US and its allies are the victims of foreign aggression. America’s crimes of war in Afghanistan and Iraq are committed in the name of 9/11 under a counter terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks are used to harness public opinion into supporting a war without borders. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” are set in motion.
Video: Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation to the Kuala Lumpur 9/11 Revisited Conference, November 19, 2012
Chronology of Events
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The war cabinet had decided to launch an an illegal and criminal war on Afghanistan, based on essentially two interrelated concepts:
1. The 9/11 attacks although allegedly conducted by Al Qaeda were upheld as an all out military attack by a foreign power.
2. Afghanistan in allegedly supporting Al Qaeda, was responsible for an act of military aggression directed against the United States of America.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. In taking on this stance they provided legitimacy to the conduct of war crimes. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America. The post 9/11 era was also characterised by the development of Islamophobia, including routine ethnic profiling directed against Muslims.
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. Rawalpindi is the Headquarters of the Pakistani military including its intelligence apparatus. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan. (transcript of CBS report, see http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CBS203A.html , see also http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/2...5887.shtml
CBS News footage of the Rawalpindi, Pakistan, hospital where bin Laden was allegedly treated the day before 9/11. [Source: CBS News]
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “Its like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
Recovering from his hospital treatment in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, how could Osama have coordinated the 9/11 attacks?
How could Afghanistan be made responsible for these attacks by Al Qaeda? Bin Laden is a national of Saudi Arabia who, according to CBS News, was not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan at the time of the attacks.
September 12, 2001: The Invasion of Afghanistan: NATO’s Doctrine of Collective Security
The immediate response of the US and its NATO allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who at the time of the attacks was in Pakistan, protected by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus. In a bitter irony, the Pakistani government and military, which had facilitated bin Laden’s hospitalization in Rawalpindi on September 10, offered to assist the US in “going after bin Laden”. An agreement to this effect was reached on September 12 in Washington between the head of Pakistan’s military Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmed and Secretary Colin Powell.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Afghan government was complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan (taken by the war cabinet at 11pm on September 11), invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The War on Afghanistan: First Stage of the “Global War on Terrorism”
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away.
Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. Confirmed by press reports, the war on Afghanistan was already in an advanced state of readiness prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
In other words, the 9/11 attacks were used as a means to trigger a military agenda which was already on the drawing board of both the Pentagon and NATO.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Immediately following 9/11, the PATRIOT legislation was adopted. The Homeland Security apparatus was launched, with a view to “protecting Americans against terrorists”. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty: NATO’s Legal Argument
In invoking Article 5 on the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council endorsed a criminal military agenda, in derogation of international law.
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, responded to the decision of the War Cabinet taken a few hours earlier at 11pm on 9/11, adopted the following resolution:
“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)
In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) was considered as an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security.
Under no stretch of the imagination, can the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
“Use of Armed Force” only “If It is Determined…”
There was an “if” in the September 12 resolution. Article 5 would apply only if it is determined that Afghanistan as a Nation State was complicit or behind the 9/11 attacks.
In practice, the “if” had already been waived prior to 9/11. The entire NATO arsenal was already on a war footing. In military terms, NATO and the US were already in an advanced state of readiness. Known to military analysts, but never revealed in the Western media, the implementation of a large scale theater war takes at least one year of advanced operational planning, prior to the launching of an invasion.
The use of article 5 of the Washington Treaty had in all likelihood been contemplated by military planners, as a pretext for waging war, prior to 9/11.
There was, however, no official declaration of war on September 12th. The Alliance waited until 3 days before the invasion to declare war on Afghanistan, an impoverished country which by no stretch of the imagination could have launched an attack against a member state of “The North Atlantic area”.
The September 12 resolution of the Atlantic Council required “determination” and corroborating evidence, that:
1) Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden with the support of a foreign power had ordered the “attack from abroad” on the United States of America;
2) The terrorist attacks of 9/11 constituted a bona fide military operation (under the provisions of Article 5) by an alleged foreign country (Afghanistan) against a NATO member state, and consequently against all NATO member states under the doctrine of collective security:
“Article 5 and the case of the terrorist attacks against the United States: The United States has been the object of brutal terrorist attacks. It immediately consulted with the other members of the Alliance. The Alliance determined that the US had been the object of an armed attack. The Alliance therefore agreed that if it was determined that this attack was directed from abroad, it would be regarded as covered by Article 5. NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, subsequently informed the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the Alliance’s decision.
Article 5 has thus been invoked, but no determination has yet been made whether the attack against the United States was directed from abroad. If such a determination is made, each Ally will then consider what assistance it should provide. In practice, there will be consultations among the Allies. Any collective action by NATO will be decided by the North Atlantic Council. The United States can also carry out independent actions, consistent with its rights and obligations under the UN Charter.
Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to the situation. This assistance is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. Each individual member determines how it will contribute and will consult with the other members, bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
By invoking Article 5, NATO members have shown their solidarity toward the United States and condemned, in the strongest possible way, the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September.
If the conditions are met for the application of Article 5, NATO Allies will decide how to assist the United States. (Many Allies have clearly offered emergency assistance). Each Ally is obliged to assist the United States by taking forward, individually and in concert with other Allies, such action as it deems necessary. This is an individual obligation on each Ally and each Ally is responsible for determining what it deems necessary in these particular circumstances.
No collective action will be taken by NATO until further consultations are held and further decisions are made by the the North Atlantic Council. (NATO, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report
The final decision to invoke Article 5 in relation to the 9/11 attacks came three weeks later upon the submission to the NATO Council of a mysterious classified report by a US State Department official named Frank Taylor. The report was submitted to NATO on October 2nd, 5 days before the commencement of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.
Frank Taylor was working in the US State Department. He had been entrusted with the writing of a brief to establish whether the US “had been attacked from abroad”, pursuant to the North Atlantic Council’s resolution of September 12 2001.
US Ambassador at Large and Co-ordinator for Counter-terrorism Frank Taylor briefed the North Atlantic Council on October 2nd, five days before the commencement of the bombings.
On October 2nd he handed his brief to NATO “on the results of investigations into the 11 September attacks…. ” NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009).
The classified report was not released to the media. And to this date, to our knowledge, it has remained classified.
NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson casually summarised the substance of the Frank Taylor report in a press release:
“This morning, the United States briefed the North Atlantic Council on the results of the investigation into who was responsible for the horrific terrorist attacks which took place on September 11.
The briefing was given by Ambassador Frank Taylor, the United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-terrorism.
This morning’s briefing follows those offered by United States Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and illustrates the commitment of the United States to maintain close cooperation with Allies.
Today’s was classified briefing and so I cannot give you all the details.
Briefings are also being given directly by the United States to the Allies in their capitals.
The briefing addressed the events of September 11 themselves, the results of the investigation so far, what is known about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida organisation and their involvement in the attacks and in previous terrorist activity, and the links between al-Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The facts are clear and compelling. The information presented points conclusively to an al-Qaida role in the September 11 attacks.
We know that the individuals who carried out these attacks were part of the world-wide terrorist network of al-Qaida, headed by Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants and protected by the Taliban.
On the basis of this briefing, it has now been determined that the attack against the United States on September 11 was directed from abroad and shall therefore be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack on one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
I want to reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO Allies in the campaign against terrorism.” (Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General, statement to the NATO Council, State Department, Appendix H, Multinational Response to September 11 NATO Press http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10313.pdf, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
In other words, 2 days before the actual commencement of the bombing campaign on October 7, the North Atlantic Council decided, based on the information provided by Frank Taylor to the Council “that the attacks were directed from abroad” by Al Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, thereby requiring an action on the part of NATO under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty ( NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009):
NATO action under article 5, was outlined in an October 4 decision, 3 days before the commencement of the bombings.
Two days later, on 4 October, NATO agreed on eight measures in support the United States, which were tantamount to an illegal declaration of war on Afghanistan:
to enhance intelligence sharing and co-operation, both bilaterally and in appropriate NATO bodies, relating to the threats posed by terrorism and the actions to be taken against it;
to provide, individually or collectively, as appropriate and according to their capabilities, [military] assistance to Allies and other states which are or may be subject to increased terrorist threats as a result of their support for the campaign against terrorism;
to take necessary measures to provide increased security for facilities of the United States and other Allies on their territory;
to backfill selected Allied assets in NATO’s area of responsibility that are required to directly support operations against terrorism;
to provide blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other Allies’ aircraft, in accordance with the necessary air traffic arrangements and national procedures, for military flights related to operations against terrorism; to provide access for the United States and other Allies to ports and airfields on the territory of NATO nations for operations against terrorism, including for refuelling, in accordance with national procedures;
that the Alliance is ready to deploy elements of its Standing Naval Forces to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to provide a NATO presence and demonstrate resolve; and that the Alliance is similarly ready to deploy elements of its NATO Airborne Early Warning Force to support operations against terrorism. NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009 emphasis added)
Press reports of Frank Taylor’s brief to the NATO Council were scanty. The invocation of Article 5, five days before the bombings commenced, was barely mentioned. The media consensus was: “all roads lead to Bin Laden” as if bin Laden was a Nation State which had attacked America.
What stands out are outright lies and fabrications. Moreover, prior to October 2nd, NATO had no pretext under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty to intervene militarily in Afghanistan.
The pretext was provided by Frank Taylor’s classified report, which was not made public.
The two UN Security Council resolutions adopted in the course of September 2001, did not, under any circumstances, provide a justification for the invasion and illegal occupation of a UN member country of 28 million people. (see Security Council resolution 1368 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts, Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts).
UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) called for prevention and suppression of terrorist acts, as well suppression of the financing of terrorism:
“(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;
…
“3. Calls upon all States to:
“(a) Find ways of intensifying and accelerating the exchange of operational information, especially regarding actions or movements of terrorist persons or networks; forged or falsified travel documents; traffic in arms, explosives or sensitive materials; use of communications technologies by terrorist groups; and the threat posed by the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups;
“(b) Exchange information in accordance with international and domestic law and cooperate on administrative and judicial matters to prevent the commission of terrorist acts;
“© Cooperate, particularly through bilateral and multilateral arrangements and agreements, to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against perpetrators of such acts;
…
“4. Notes with concern the close connection between international terrorism and transnational organized crime, illicit drugs, money-laundering, illegal arms-trafficking, and illegal movement of nuclear, chemical, biological and other potentially deadly materials, and in this regard emphasizes the need to enhance coordination of efforts on national, subregional, regional and international levels in order to strengthen a global response to this serious challenge and threat to international security;
“5. Declares that acts, methods, and practices of terrorism are contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations and that knowingly financing, planning and inciting terrorist acts are also contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations (excerpts of UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001, See also UN Press Release SC 7178 SECURITY COUNCIL UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTS WIDE-RANGING ANTI-TERRORISM RESOLUTION; CALLS FOR SUPPRESSING FINANCING, IMPROVING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION, Security Council, 4385th Meeting, September 2001)
Nowhere in this resolution is there any mention of military action against a UN member State.
The US led war on Afghanistan, using 9/11 as a pretext and a justification is illegal and criminal.
The US and NATO heads of state and heads of government from 2001 to the present are complicit in the launching of a criminal and illegal war.
The Big Lie: Al Qaeda Made in America
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
Both the 9/11 Commission Report as well as the Western media have largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks. The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “Global War on Terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
This is why a legal procedure directed against the actual perpetrators of 9/11 is absolutely essential.
History of Al Qaeda
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
”The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official,
Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987.
(source RAWA)
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Iraq: Alleged State Sponsor of the 9/11 Attacks
The formulation of a war of retribution conducted in the name of 9/11 was not limited to Afghanistan.
In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. .,.. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America. President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Barely two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, September 11, 2001 was mentioned abundantly by president Bush. In the weeks leading up to the March invasion, 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (See . The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com, March 14, 2003)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
Iran: Condemned by a New York City Court for Supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 Attacks
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 9/11 Commission’s recommendation was that this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
In the December 2011 court judgment (Havlish v. Iran) “U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran), Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their intelligence counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Realities are turned upside down. Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East an d North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command:
“Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.” (http://www.debka.com/article/21255/ Debkafile, August 31, 2011).
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-an...litzkrieg/
“Crimes against Civilization”
9/11 mythology has been the mainstay of war propaganda, which in itself constitutes a criminal act under international law.
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
Muslims are presented as the perpetrators of the 9/11, thereby unleashing a Worldwide demonization campaign.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council. All these various bodies are complicit in a criminal project.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally. According to the media, “Muslims were behind the attacks”, thereby justifying a war of retribution against Muslim countries.
Racism and Islamophobia are an integral part of war propaganda.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion.
It prevents people from thinking. It strikes at the core of human values. In a sense, it destroys civilization.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The criminality underlying post 9/11 propaganda is of much broader nature, affecting people’s mindsets, redefining fundamental social, political and institutional relations.
“Crimes against Civilization” have been committed.
9/11 mythology precipitates the World into barbarity.
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Ten Years Later: Who Is Osama bin Laden?
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THE 9/11 READER.
THE SEPTEMBER 11 2001 TERROR ATTACKS
9/11 Truth: Revealing the Lies, Commemorating the 9/11 Tragedy
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-911-re...ks/5303012
INTRODUCTION
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history. a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” were set in motion.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
September 11, 2001 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director [b]James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.” [/b]
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
The 9/11 Commission Report has largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks.
The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
Click to view video
Special GRTV Feature Production
– by James Corbett – 2011-09-08
***
The 911 Reader is composed of a carefully selected collection of key articles published by Global Research in the course of the last eleven years. [since 2001]
9/11 was an important landmark for Global Research. Our website was launched on September 9, 2001, two days prior to 9/11. Our coverage of 9/11 was initiated on September 12, 2001.
Within this collection of more than 60 chapters, we have included several important reports from our archives, published by Global Research in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. These articles provide a focus on issues pertaining to the 9/11 Timeline, foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the attack on the Pentagon, the issue of insider trading on Wall Street in the days preceding 9/11 pointing to foreknowledge of the attacks.
What prevails is a complex web of lies and fabrications, pertaining to various dimensions of the 9/11 tragedy. The falsehoods contained in the official 9/11 narrative are manifold, extending from the affirmation that Osama bin Laden was the mastermind, to the assertion by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that the WTC buildings collapsed due to the impacts of fire. (see Part III).
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “Its like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
October 7, 2001: Waging America’s 9/11 War of Retribution against Afghanistan
The immediate response of the US and its allies to the 9/11 attacks was to declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden. By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Taliban were complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times:
“When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan, invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) is an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security. Under any stretch of the imagination, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon cannot be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin Laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away. Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. The war on Afghanistan was already in the advanced planning stages prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, almost immediately following 9/11 with the adoption of the PATRIOT legislation and the setting up of a Homeland Security apparatus, under the pretext of protecting Americans. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Al Qaeda is a US Intelligence Asset
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
“The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
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Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official,
Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987.
(source RAWA)
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Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
The Collapse of the World Trade Center Buildings
Based on the findings of Richard Gage of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was not caused by fire resulting from the crash of the planes:
In more than 100 steel-framed, high-rise fires (most of them very hot, very large and very long-lasting), not one has collapsed, ever. So it behooves all of us, as your own former chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division, Dr. James Quintiere, said, “to look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of these collapses.”
Let’s start with temperatures – 1,340° F. temperatures, recorded in thermal images of the surface of the World Trade Center rubble pile a week after 9/11 by NASA’s AVIRIS equipment on USGS overflights. Such temperatures cannot be achieved by oxygen-starved hydrocarbon fires. Such fires burn at only 600 to 800° F. Remember, there was no fire on the top of the pile. The source of this incredible heat was therefore below the surface of the rubble, where it must have been far hotter than 1,340 degrees.
Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., who was hired for the Building 7 cleanup, said that “molten steel was found at 7 WTC.” Leslie Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, stated that on October 5, “21 days after the attacks, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” Fire department personnel, recorded on video, reported seeing “molten steel running down the channel rails… like you’re in a foundry – like lava from a volcano.” Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter, saw a crane lifting a steel beam vertically from deep within a pile. He said “it was dripping from the molten steel.” Bart Voorsanger, an architect hired to save “relics from the rubble,” stated about the multi-ton “meteorite” that it was a “fused element of molten steel and concrete.”
Steel melts at about 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit, about twice the temperature of the World Trade Center Tower 1 and 2 fires as estimated by NIST. So what melted the steel?
Appendix C of FEMA’s BPAT Report documents steel samples showing rapid oxidation, sulfidation, and intergranular melting. A liquid eutectic mixture, including sulfur from an unknown source, caused intense corrosion of the steel, gaping holes in wide flange beams, and the thinning of half-inch-thick flanges to almost razor-sharpness in the World Trade Center 7 steel. The New York Times called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”
NIST left all of this crucial forensic evidence out of its report. Why? Because it didn’t fit in with the official conspiracy theory.
Last year, physicist Steven Jones, two other physicists, and a geologist analyzed the slag at the ends of the beams and in the samples of the previously molten metal. They found iron, aluminum, sulfur, manganese and fluorine – the chemical evidence of thermate, a high-tech incendiary cutting charge used by the military to cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. The by-product of the thermate reaction is molten iron! There’s no other possible source for all the molten iron that was found. One of thermate’s key ingredients is sulfur, which can form the liquid eutectic that FEMA found and lower the melting point of steel.
In addition, World Trade Center 7’s catastrophic structural failure showed every characteristic of explosive, controlled demolition. … The destruction began suddenly at the base of the building. Several first responders reported explosions occurring about a second before the collapse. There was the symmetrical, near-free-fall speed of collapse, through the path of greatest resistance – with 40,000 tons of steel designed to resist this load – straight down into its own footprint. This requires that all the columns have to fail within a fraction of a second of each other – perimeter columns as well as core columns. There was also the appearance of mistimed explosions (squibs?) at the upper seven floors on the network video recordings of the collapse. And we have expert testimony from a European demolitions expert, Danny Jowenko, who said “This is controlled demolition… a team of experts did this… This is professional work, without any doubt.”
Fire cannot produce these effects. Fire produces large, gradual deformations and asymmetrical collapses. Thermate can produce all of these effects used in conjunction with linear shaped charges. If the thermate is formed into ultra-fine particles, as has been accomplished at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is called super-thermate, and is very explosive.(Richard Gage, January 2008)
The following AE911Truth Video provides evidence that the WTC center towers were brought down through controlled demolition.
According to David Ray Griffin:
“The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse—never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York City—never.” See David Ray Griffin).
According to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, based on solid scientific analysis and evidence, the collapse of the WTC towers was engineered through controlled demolition. While AE11Truth does not speculate on who might be behind the conspiracy to bring down the WTC buildings, they nonetheless suggest that the carrying out such an operation would require a carefully planned course of action with prior access to the buildings as well as an advanced level of expertise in the use of explosives, etc.
The Collapse of WTC Building Seven
The most grotesque lie pertains to the BBC and CNN announcement in the afternoon of September 11, that WTC Building Seven (The Solomon Building) had collapsed. The BBC report went live at 5.00pm, 21 minutes before the actual occurrence of the collapse, indelibly pointing to foreknowledge of the collapse of WTC 7. CNN anchor Aaron Brown announced that the building “has either collapsed or is collapsing” about an hour before the event.
CNN anchor Aaron Brown seems to struggle to make sense of what he is seeing one minute after announcing that WTC Building 7, whose erect facade is clearly visible in his view towards the Trade Center, has or is collapsing.
undefined
Coverup and Complicity
The 911 Reader presents factual information and analysis which points to cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.
This body of articles by prominent authors, scholars, architects, engineers, largely refutes the official narrative of the 9/11 Commission Report, which is reviewed in Part IV. It dispels the notion that America was attacked on September 11, 2001 on the orders of Osama bin Laden.
This is a central issue because US military doctrine since 9/11 has been predicated on “defending the American Homeland” against Islamic terrorists as well as waging pre-emptive wars against Al Qaeda and its various “state sponsors”. Afghanistan was bombed and invaded as part of the “war on terrorism”. In March 2003, Iraq was also invaded.
War Propaganda
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation (Part XI) is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of media disinformation and war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion. It prevents people from thinking.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained –by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The Alleged Role of Iraq in the 9/11 Attacks
9/11 mythology has been a mainstay of war propaganda. In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
“The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. .,.. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.” (President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
[b]Iran: Alleged State Sponsor of 9/11[/b]
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 91/11 Commission’s recommendation was that the this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
“U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran), Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Iran and Afghanistan of supporting terrorism, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command: “Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.”
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-an...litzkrieg/
Table of Contents of the 9/11 Reader
In Part I, the 911 Reader provides a review of what happened on the morning of 9/11, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, at Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM), What was the response of the US Air Force in the immediate wake of the attacks? Part II focusses on “What Happened on the Planes” as described in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Part III sheds light on what caused the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. It also challenges the official narrative with regard to the attack on the Pentagon.
Part IV reviews and refutes the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Part V focusses on the issue of foreknowledge by Western intelligence agencies. Part VI examines the issue of how foreknowledge of the attacks was used as an instrument of insider trading on airline stocks in the days preceding September 11, 2001. The bonanza financial gains resulting from insurance claims to the leaseholders of the WTC buildings is also examined.
Part VII focusses on the history and central role of Al Qaeda as a US intelligence asset. Since the Soviet-Afghan war, US intelligence has supported the formation of various jihadist organizations. An understanding of this history is crucial in refuting the official 9/11 narrative which claims that Al Qaeda, was behind the attacks.
Part VIII centers on the life and death of 9/11 “Terror Mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who was recruited by the CIA in the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war. This section also includes an analysis of the mysterious death of Osama bin Laden, allegedly executed by US Navy Seals in a suburb of Islamabad in May 2011.
Part IX focusses on “False Flags” and the Pentagon’s “Second 9/11”.
Part X examines the issue of “Deep Events” with contributions by renowned scholars Peter Dale Scott and Daniele Ganser.
Part XI examines the structure of 9/11 propaganda which consists in “creating” as well “perpetuating” a “9/11 Legend”. How is this achieved? Incessantly, on a daily basis, Al Qaeda, the alleged 9/11 Mastermind is referred to by the Western media, government officials, members of the US Congress, Wall Street analysts, etc. as an underlying cause of numerous World events.
Part XII focusses on the practice of 9/11 Justice directed against the alleged culprits of the 9/11 attacks.
The legitimacy of 9/11 propaganda requires fabricating “convincing evidence” and “proof” that those who are accused actually carried out the attacks. Sentencing of Muslims detained in Guantanamo is part of war propaganda. It depicts innocent men who are accused of the 9/11 attacks, based on confessions acquired through systematic torture throughout their detention.
Part XIII focusses on 9/11 Truth. The objective of 9/11 Truth is to ultimately dismantle the propaganda apparatus which is manipulating the human mindset. The 9/11 Reader concludes with a retrospective view of 9/11 ten years later.
PART I
Timeline: What Happened on the Morning of September 11, 2001
Nothing Urgent: The Curious Lack of Military Action on the Morning of September. 11, 2001
– by George Szamuely – 2012-08-12
Political Deception: The Missing Link behind 9-11
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2002-06-20
On the morning of September 11, Pakistan’s Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged “money-man” behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
9/11 Contradictions: Bush in the Classroom
– by Dr. David Ray Griffin – 2008-04-04
9/11 Contradictions: When Did Cheney Enter the Underground Bunker?
– by David Ray Griffin – 2008-04-24
VIDEO: Pilots For 9/11 Truth: Intercepted
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PART II
What Happened on the Planes
“United 93”: What Happened on the Planes?
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-05-01
Phone Calls from the 9/11 Airliners
Response to Questions Evoked by My Fifth Estate Interview
– by Prof David Ray Griffin – 2010-01-12
Given the cell phone technology available in 2001, cell phone calls from airliners at altitudes of more than a few thousand feet, were virtually impossible
Ted Olson’s Report of Phone Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three Official Denials
– by David Ray Griffin – 2008-04-01
Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided apparent “evidence” that American 77 had struck the Pentagon.
PART III
What Caused the Collapse of
The WTC Buildings and the Pentagon?
The Destruction of the World Trade Center: Why the Official Account Cannot Be True
– by Dr. David Ray Griffin – 2006-01-29
The official theory about the Twin Towers says that they collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires
Evidence Refutes the Official 9/11 Investigation: The Scientific Forensic Facts
– by Richard Gage, Gregg Roberts – 2010-10-13
VIDEO: Controlled Demolitions Caused the Collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings on September 11, 2001
– by Richard Gage – 2009-09-20
VIDEO: 9/11: The Myth and The Reality
Now on GRTV
– by Prof. David Ray Griffin – 2011-08-30
Undisputed Facts Point to the Controlled Demolition of WTC 7
– by Richard Gage – 2008-03-28
VIDEO: 9/11 Explosive Evidence: Experts Speak Out
See the trailer for this ground-breaking film on GRTV
– 2011-08-03
9/11: “Honest Mistake” or BBC Foreknowledge of Collapse of WTC 7? Jane Standley Breaks Her Silence
– by James Higham – 2011-08-18
The Collapse of WTC Building Seven.
Interview. Comment by Elizabeth Woodworth
– by David Ray Griffin – 2009-10-17
Building What? How SCADs Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight: The 9/11 “Official Story” and the Collapse of WTC Building Seven
– by Prof David Ray Griffin – 2010-05-30
Besides omitting and otherwise falsifying evidence, NIST also committed the type of scientific fraud called fabrication, which means simply “making up results.”
VIDEO; Firefighters’ Analysis of the 9/11 Attacks Refutes the Official Report
– by Erik Lawyer – 2012-08-27
VIDEO: Pentagon Admits More 9/11 Remains Dumped in Landfill
– by James Corbett – 2012-03-01
The Pentagon revealed that some of the unidentifiable remains from victims at the Pentagon and Shanksville sites on September 11, 2001 were disposed of in a landfill.
9/11: The Attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001
The Official Version Amounts to an Enormous Lie
– by Thierry Meyssan – 2012-08-16
PART IV
Lies and Fabrications: The 9/11 Commission Report
A National Disgrace: A Review of the 9/11 Commission Report
– by David Ray Griffin – 2005-03-24
The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571 Page Lie
– by Dr. David Ray Griffin – 2005-09-08
September 11, 2001: 21 Reasons to Question the Official Story about 9/11
– by David Ray Griffin – 2008-09-11
911 “Conspiracy Theorists” Vindicated: Pentagon deliberately misled Public Opinion
Military officials made false statements to Congress and to the 911 Commission
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-08-02
The 9/11 Commission’s Incredible Tales
Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93
– by Prof. David Ray Griffin – 2005-12-13
9/11 and the War on Terror: Polls Show What People Think 10 Years Later
– by Washington’s Blog – 2011-09-10
PART V
Foreknowledge of 9/11
VIDEO: The SECRET SERVICE ON 9/11: What did the Government Know?
Learn more on this week’s GRTV Feature Interview
– by Kevin Ryan, James Corbett – 2012-04-10
9/11 Foreknowledge and “Intelligence Failures”: “Revealing the Lies” on 9/11 Perpetuates the “Big Lie”
– by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky – 2011-09-14
“Foreknowledge” and “Failure to act” upholds the notion that the terrorist attacks (“act of war”) “waged by Muslims against America” are real, when all the facts and findings point towards coverup and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.
Foreknowledge of 9/11 by Western Intelligence Agencies
– by Michael C. Ruppert – 2012-08-21
PART VI
Insider Trading and the 9/11 Financial Bonanza
9/11 Attacks: Criminal Foreknowledge and Insider Trading lead directly to the CIA’s Highest Ranks
CIA Executive Director “Buzzy” Krongard managed Firm that handled “Put” Options on UAL
– by Michael C. Ruppert – 2012-08-13
The 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC): Unspoken Financial Bonanza
– by Prof Michel Chossudovsky – 2012-04-27
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: Insider Trading 9/11 … the Facts Laid Bare
– by Lars Schall – 2012-03-20
Osama Bin Laden and The 911 Illusion: The 9/11 Short-Selling Financial Scam
– by Dean Henderson – 2011-05-09
PART VII
9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT)
Political Deception: The Missing Link behind 9-11
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2002-06-20
On the morning of September 11, Pakistan’s Chief Spy General Mahmoud Ahmad, the alleged “money-man” behind the 9-11 hijackers, was at a breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by Senator Bob Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees.
9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2010-09-09
Osama bin Laden was recruited by the CIA in 1979. The US spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings.
The Central Role of Al Qaeda in Bush’s National Security Doctrine
“Revealing the Lies” on 9/11 Perpetuates the “Big Lie”
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2007-07-12
NATO’s Doctrine of Collective Security
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2009-12-21
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2010-08-30
What is now unfolding is a generalized process of demonization of an entire population group
Osamagate
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2001-10-09
The main justification for waging this war has been totally fabricated. The American people have been deliberately and consciously misled by their government into supporting a major military adventure which affects our collective future.
The “Demonization” of Muslims and the Battle for Oil
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2007-01-04
Muslim countries possess three quarters of the World’s oil reserves. In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves.
Was America Attacked by Muslims on 9/11?
– by David Ray Griffin – 2008-09-10
Much of US foreign policy since 9/11 has been based on the assumption that America was attacked by Muslims on 9/11.
New Documents Detail America’s Strategic Response to 9/11
Rumsfeld’s War Aim: “Significantly Change the World’s Political Map”
– by National Security Archive – 2011-09-12
PART VIII
The Alleged 9/11 Mastermind:
The Life and Death of Osama bin Laden
Who Is Osama Bin Laden?
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2001-09-12
VIDEO: The Last Word on Osama Bin Laden
– by James Corbett – 2011-05-24
Osama bin Laden: A Creation of the CIA
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2011-05-03
Interview with Osama bin Laden. Denies his Involvement in 9/11
Full text of Pakistani paper’s Sept 01 “exclusive” interview
– 2011-05-09
Where was Osama on September 11, 2001?
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2008-09-11
On September 10. 2001, Osama was in a Pakistan military hospital in Rawalpindi, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan
Osama bin Laden, among the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives”: Why was he never indicted for his alleged role in 9/11?
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-09-17
Osama bin Laden: Already Dead… Evidence that Bin Laden has been Dead for Several Years
– by Prof. David Ray Griffin – 2011-05-02
The Mysterious Death of Osama bin Laden: Creating Evidence Where There Is None
– by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – 2011-08-04
The Assassination of Osama bin Laden: Glaring Anomalies in the Official Narrative
Osama was Left Handed…
– by Felicity Arbuthnot – 2011-05-11
The Assassination of Osama Bin Laden
– by Fidel Castro Ruz – 2011-05-07
Dancing on the Grave of 9/11. Osama and “The Big Lie”
– by Larry Chin – 2011-05-05
PART IX
“False Flags”: The Pentagon’s Second 9/11
The Pentagon’s “Second 911”
“Another [9/11] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against some known targets”
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-08-10
The presumption of this military document, is that a Second 911 attack “which is lacking today” would usefully create both a “justification and an opportunity” to wage war on “some known targets
Crying Wolf: Terror Alerts based on Fabricated Intelligence
– by Michel Chossudovsky – 2006-08-20
This is not the first time that brash and unsubstantiated statements have been made regarding an impending terror attack, which have proven to be based on “faulty intelligence”.
PART X
“Deep Events” and State Violence
The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11
– by Prof. Peter Dale Scott – 2011-11-22
The Doomsday Project is the Pentagon’s name for the emergency planning “to keep the White House and Pentagon running during and after a nuclear war or some other major crisis.”
[b]JFK and 9/11 [/b]
Insights Gained from Studying Both
– by Dr. Peter Dale Scott – 2006-12-20
In both 9/11 and the JFK assassination, the US government and the media immediately established a guilty party. Eventually, in both cases a commission was set up to validate the official narrative.
Able Danger adds twist to 9/11
9/11 Ringleader connected to secret Pentagon operation
– by Dr. Daniele Ganser – 2005-08-27
Atta was connected to a secret operation of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. A top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger identified Atta and 3 other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.
9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics
– by Prof. Peter Dale Scott – 2008-06-11
The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become thinkable…
Al Qaeda: The Database.
– by Pierre-Henri Bunel – 2011-05-12
PART XI
Propaganda: Creating and Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend
[b]September 11, 2001: The Propaganda Preparation for 9/11: Creating the Osama bin Laden “Legend” [/b]
– by Chaim Kupferberg – 2011-09-11
THE 9/11 MYTH: State Propaganda, Historical Revisionism, and the Perpetuation of the 9/11 Myth
– by Prof. James F. Tracy – 2012-05-06
[b]Al Qaeda and Human Consciousness: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda…. An Incessant and Repetitive Public Discourse [/b]
– by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky – 2012-03-24
9/11 Truth, Inner Consciousness and the “Public Mind”
– by James F. Tracy – 2012-03-18
PART XII
Post 9/11 “Justice”
IRAN ACCUSED OF BEING BEHIND 9/11 ATTACKS.
U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran)
– by Julie Lévesque – 2012-05-11
U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran)
“[b]American Justice”: The Targeted Assassination of Osama Bin Laden[/b]
Extrajudicial executions are unlawful
– by Prof. Marjorie Cohn – 2011-05-10
ALLEGED “MASTERMIND” OF 9/11 ON TRIAL IN GUANTANAMO: Military Tribunals proceed Despite Evidence of Torture
– by Tom Carter – 2012-05-30
U.S. Military Drugged Detainees to Obtain FALSE Confessions
Self-confessed 9/11 “mastermind” falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit
– by Washington’s Blog – 2012-07-15
911 MILITARY TRIAL: Pentagon Clears Way for Military Trial of Five charged in 9/11 Attacks
– by Bill Van Auken – 2012-04-06
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial will convict us all
– by Paul Craig Roberts – 2009-11-25
PART XIII
9/11 Truth
Revealing the Lies, Commemorating the 9/11 Tragedy
VIDEO: Commemorating the 10th Anniversary of 9/11
– by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky – 2011-09-01
VIDEO: AFTER 9/11: TEN YEARS OF WAR
Special GRTV Feature Production
– by James Corbett – 2011-09-08
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THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT :
A 571-PAGE LIE
Dr. David Ray Griffin
9/11 Visibility Project
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/co...nlies.html
In discussing my second 9/11 book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, I have often said, only half in jest, that a better title might have been "a 571-page lie." (Actually, I was saying "a 567-page lie," because I was forgetting to count the four pages of the Preface.) In making this statement, one of my points has been that the entire Report is constructed in support of one big lie: that the official story about 9/11 is true.
Another point, however, is that in the process of telling this overall lie, The 9/11 Commission Report tells many lies about particular issues. This point is implied by my critique's subtitle, "Omissions and Distortions." It might be thought, to be sure, that of the two types of problems signaled by those two terms, only those designated "distortions" can be considered lies.
It is better, however, to understand the two terms as referring to two types of lies: implicit and explicit. We have an explicit lie when the Report claims that the core of each of the Twin Towers consisted of a hollow steel shaft or when it claims that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down order until after 10:10 that morning. But we have an implicit lie when the Commission, in its discussion of the 19 alleged suicide hijackers, omits the fact that at least six of them have credibly been reported to be still alive, or when it fails to mention the fact that Building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed. Such omissions are implicit lies partly because they show that the Commission did not honor its stated intention "to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11." They are also lies insofar as the Commission could avoid telling an explicit lie about the issue in question only by not mentioning it, which, I believe, was the case in at least most instances.
Given these two types of lies, it might be wondered how many lies are contained in The 9/11 Commission Report. I do not know. But, deciding to see how many lies I had discussed in my book, I found that I had identified over 100 of them. Once I had made the list, it occurred to me that others might find this summary helpful. Hence this article.
One caveat: Although in some of the cases it is obvious that the Commission has lied, in other cases I would say, as I make clear in the book, that it appears that the Commission has lied. However, in the interests of simply giving a brief listing of claims that I consider to be lies, I will ignore this distinction between obvious and probable lies, leaving it to readers, if they wish, to look up the discussion in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. For ease in doing this, I have parenthetically indicated the pages of the book on which the various issues are discussed.
Given this clarification, I now list the omissions and claims of The 9/11 Commission Report that I, in my critique of that report, portrayed as lies:
1. The omission of evidence that at least six of the alleged hijackers--including Waleed al-Shehri, said by the Commission probably to have stabbed a flight attendant on Flight 11 before it crashed into the North Tower of the WTC--are still alive (19-20).
2. The omission of evidence about Mohamed Atta--such as his reported fondness for alcohol, pork, and lap dances--that is in tension with the Commission's claim that he had become fanatically religious (20-21).
3. The obfuscation of the evidence that Hani Hanjour was too poor a pilot to have flown an airliner into the Pentagon (21-22).
4. The omission of the fact that the publicly released flight manifests contain no Arab names (23).
5. The omission of the fact that fire has never, before or after 9/11, caused steel-frame buildings to collapse (25).
6. The omission of the fact that the fires in the Twin Towers were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting compared with fires in several steel-frame buildings that did not collapse (25-26).
7. The omission of the fact that, given the hypothesis that the collapses were caused by fire, the South Tower, which was struck later than the North Tower and also had smaller fires, should not have collapsed first (26).
8. The omission of the fact that WTC 7 (which was not hit by an airplane and which had only small, localized fires) also collapsed--an occurrence that FEMA admitted it could not explain (26).
9. The omission of the fact that the collapse of the Twin Towers (like that of Building 7) exemplified at least 10 features suggestive of controlled demolition (26-27).
10. The claim that the core of each of the Twin Towers was "a hollow steel shaft"--a claim that denied the existence of the 47 massive steel columns that in reality constituted the core of each tower and that, given the "pancake theory" of the collapses, should have still been sticking up many hundreds of feet in the air (27-28).
11. The omission of Larry Silverstein's statement that he and the fire department commander decided to "pull" Building 7 (28).
12. The omission of the fact that the steel from the WTC buildings was quickly removed from the crime scene and shipped overseas before it could be analyzed for evidence of explosives (30).
13. The omission of the fact that because Building 7 had been evacuated before it collapsed, the official reason for the rapid removal of the steel--that some people might still be alive in the rubble under the steel--made no sense in this case (30).
14. The omission of Mayor Giuliani's statement that he had received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse (30-31).
15. The omission of the fact that President Bush's brother Marvin and his cousin Wirt Walker III were both principals in the company in charge of security for the WTC (31-32).
16. The omission of the fact that the west wing of the Pentagon would have been the least likely spot to be targeted by al-Qaeda terrorists, for several reasons (33-34).
17. The omission of any discussion of whether the damage done to the Pentagon was consistent with the impact of a Boeing 757 going several hundred miles per hour (34).
18. The omission of the fact that there are photos showing that the west wing's facade did not collapse until 30 minutes after the strike and also that the entrance hole appears too small for a Boeing 757 to have entered (34).
19. The omission of all testimony that has been used to cast doubt on whether remains of a Boeing 757 were visible either inside or outside the Pentagon (34-36).
20. The omission of any discussion of whether the Pentagon has a anti-missile defense system that would have brought down a commercial airliner--even though the Commission suggested that the al-Qaeda terrorists did not attack a nuclear power plant because they assumed that it would be thus defended (36).
21. The omission of the fact that pictures from various security cameras--including the camera at the gas station across from the Pentagon, the film from which was reportedly confiscated by the FBI immediately after the strike--could presumably answer the question of what really hit the Pentagon (37-38).
22. The omission of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's reference to "the missile [used] to damage [the Pentagon]" (39).
23. The apparent endorsement of a wholly unsatisfactory answer to the question of why the Secret Service agents allowed President Bush to remain at the Sarasota school at a time when, given the official story, they should have assumed that a hijacked airliner might be about to crash into the school (41-44).
24. The failure to explore why the Secret Service did not summon fighter jets to provide air cover for Air Force One (43-46).
25. The claims that when the presidential party arrived at the school, no one in the party knew that several planes had been hijacked (47-48).
26. The omission of the report that Attorney General Ashcroft was warned to stop using commercial airlines prior to 9/11 (50).
27. The omission of David Schippers' claim that he had, on the basis of information provided by FBI agents about upcoming attacks in lower Manhattan, tried unsuccessfully to convey this information to Attorney General Ashcroft during the six weeks prior to 9/11 (51).
28. The omission of any mention of the FBI agents who reportedly claimed to have known the targets and dates of the attacks well in advance (51-52).
29. The claim, by means of a circular, question-begging rebuttal, that the unusual purchases of put options prior to 9/11 did not imply advance knowledge of the attacks on the part of the buyers (52-57).
30. The omission of reports that both Mayor Willie Brown and some Pentagon officials received warnings about flying on 9/11 (57).
31. The omission of the report that Osama bin Laden, who already was America's "most wanted" criminal, was treated in July 2001 by an American doctor in the American Hospital in Dubai and visited by the local CIA agent (59).
32. The omission of news stories suggesting that after 9/11 the US military in Afghanistan deliberately allowed Osama bin Laden to escape (60).
33. The omission of reports, including the report of a visit to Osama bin Laden at the hospital in Dubai by the head of Saudi intelligence, that were in tension with the official portrayal of Osama as disowned by his family and his country (60-61).
34. The omission of Gerald Posner's account of Abu Zubaydah's testimony, according to which three members of the Saudi royal family--all of whom later died mysteriously within an eight-day period--were funding al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (61-65).
35. The Commission's denial that it found any evidence of Saudi funding of al-Qaeda (65-68).
36. The Commission's denial in particular that it found any evidence that money from Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa, went to al-Qaeda operatives (69-70).
37. The denial, by means of simply ignoring the distinction between private and commercial flights, that the private flight carrying Saudis from Tampa to Lexington on September 13 violated the rules for US airspace in effect at the time (71-76).
38. The denial that any Saudis were allowed to leave the United States shortly after 9/11 without being adequately investigated (76-82).
39. The omission of evidence that Prince Bandar obtained special permission from the White House for the Saudi flights (82-86).
40. The omission of Coleen Rowley's claim that some officials at FBI headquarters did see the memo from Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams (89-90).
41. The omission of Chicago FBI agent Robert Wright's charge that FBI headquarters closed his case on a terrorist cell, then used intimidation to prevent him from publishing a book reporting his experiences (91).
42. The omission of evidence that FBI headquarters sabotaged the attempt by Coleen Rowley and other Minneapolis agents to obtain a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer (91-94).
43. The omission of the 3.5 hours of testimony to the Commission by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds--testimony that, according to her later public letter to Chairman Kean, revealed serious 9/11-related cover-ups by officials at FBI headquarters (94-101).
44. The omission of the fact that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency (the ISI), was in Washington the week prior to 9/11, meeting with CIA chief George Tenet and other US officials (103-04).
45. The omission of evidence that ISI chief Ahmad had ordered $100,000 to be sent to Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11 (104-07).
46. The Commission's claim that it found no evidence that any foreign government, including Pakistan, had provided funding for the al-Qaeda operatives (106).
47. The omission of the report that the Bush administration pressured Pakistan to dismiss Ahmad as ISI chief after the appearance of the story that he had ordered ISI money sent to Atta (107-09).
48. The omission of evidence that the ISI (and not merely al-Qaeda) was behind the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masood (the leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance), which occurred just after the week-long meeting between the heads of the CIA and the ISI (110-112).
49. The omission of evidence of ISI involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Reporter Daniel Pearl (113).
50. The omission of Gerald Posner's report that Abu Zubaydah claimed that a Pakistani military officer, Mushaf Ali Mir, was closely connected to both the ISI and al-Qaeda and had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks (114).
51. The omission of the 1999 prediction by ISI agent Rajaa Gulum Abbas that the Twin Towers would be "coming down" (114).
52. The omission of the fact that President Bush and other members of his administration repeatedly spoke of the 9/11 attacks as "opportunities" (116-17).
53. The omission of the fact that The Project for the New American Century, many members of which became key figures in the Bush administration, published a document in 2000 saying that "a new Pearl Harbor" would aid its goal of obtaining funding for a rapid technological transformation of the US military (117-18).
54. The omission of the fact that Donald Rumsfeld, who as head of the commission on the US Space Command had recommended increased funding for it, used the attacks of 9/11 on that very evening to secure such funding (119-22).
55. The failure to mention the fact that three of the men who presided over the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks--Secretary Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers, and General Ralph Eberhart--were also three of the strongest advocates for the US Space Command (122).
56. The omission of the fact that Unocal had declared that the Taliban could not provide adequate security for it to go ahead with its oil-and-gas pipeline from the Caspian region through Afghanistan and Pakistan (122-25).
57. The omission of the report that at a meeting in July 2001, US representatives said that because the Taliban refused to agree to a US proposal that would allow the pipeline project to go forward, a war against them would begin by October (125-26).
58. The omission of the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book had said that for the United States to maintain global primacy, it needed to gain control of Central Asia, with its vast petroleum reserves, and that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful in getting the US public to support this imperial effort (127-28).
59. The omission of evidence that some key members of the Bush administration, including Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, had been agitating for a war with Iraq for many years (129-33).
60. The omission of notes of Rumsfeld's conversations on 9/11 showing that he was determined to use the attacks as a pretext for a war with Iraq (131-32).
61. The omission of the statement by the Project for the New American Century that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" (133-34).
62. The claim that FAA protocol on 9/11 required the time-consuming process of going through several steps in the chain of command--even though the Report cites evidence to the contrary (158).
63. The claim that in those days there were only two air force bases in NORAD's Northeast sector that kept fighters on alert and that, in particular, there were no fighters on alert at either McGuire or Andrews (159-162).
64. The omission of evidence that Andrews Air Force Base did keep several fighters on alert at all times (162-64).
65. The acceptance of the twofold claim that Colonel Marr of NEADS had to telephone a superior to get permission to have fighters scrambled from Otis and that this call required eight minutes (165-66).
66. The endorsement of the claim that the loss of an airplane's transponder signal makes it virtually impossible for the US military's radar to track that plane (166-67).
67. The claim that the Payne Stewart interception did not show NORAD's response time to Flight 11 to be extraordinarily slow (167-69).
68. The claim that the Otis fighters were not airborne until seven minutes after they received the scramble order because they did not know where to go (174-75).
69. The claim that the US military did not know about the hijacking of Flight 175 until 9:03, when it was crashing into the South Tower (181-82).
70. The omission of any explanation of (a) why NORAD's earlier report, according to which the FAA had notified the military about the hijacking of Flight 175 at 8:43, was now to be considered false and (b) how this report, if it was false, could have been published and then left uncorrected for almost three years (182).
71. The claim that the FAA did not set up a teleconference until 9:20 that morning (183).
72. The omission of the fact that a memo by Laura Brown of the FAA says that its teleconference was established at about 8:50 and that it included discussion of Flight 175's hijacking (183-84, 186).
73. The claim that the NMCC teleconference did not begin until 9:29 (186-88).
74. The omission, in the Commission's claim that Flight 77 did not deviate from its course until 8:54, of the fact that earlier reports had said 8:46 (189-90).
75. The failure to mention that the report that a large jet had crashed in Kentucky, at about the time Flight 77 disappeared from FAA radar, was taken seriously enough by the heads of the FAA and the FBI's counterterrorism unit to be relayed to the White House (190).
76. The claim that Flight 77 flew almost 40 minutes through American airspace towards Washington without being detected by the military's radar (191-92).
77. The failure to explain, if NORAD's earlier report that it was notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 was "incorrect," how this erroneous report could have arisen, i.e., whether NORAD officials had been lying or simply confused for almost three years (192-93).
78. The claim that the Langley fighter jets, which NORAD had previously said were scrambled to intercept Flight 77, were actually scrambled in response to an erroneous report from an (unidentified) FAA controller at 9:21 that Flight 11 was still up and was headed towards Washington (193-99).
79. The claim that the military did not hear from the FAA about the probable hijacking of Flight 77 before the Pentagon was struck (204-12).
80. The claim that Jane Garvey did not join Richard Clarke's videoconference until 9:40, after the Pentagon was struck (210).
81. The claim that none of the teleconferences succeeded in coordinating the FAA and military responses to the hijackings because "none of [them] included the right officials from both the FAA and the Defense Department"--although Richard Clarke says that his videoconference included FAA head Jane Garvey as well as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, the acting chair of the joint chiefs of staff (211).
82. The Commission's claim that it did not know who from the Defense Department participated in Clarke's videoconference--although Clarke's book said that it was Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers (211-212).
83. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that he was on Capitol Hill during the attacks, without mentioning Richard Clarke's contradictory account, according to which Myers was in the Pentagon participating in Clarke's videoconference (213-17).
84. The failure to mention the contradiction between Clarke's account of Rumsfeld's whereabouts that morning and Rumsfeld's own accounts (217-19).
85. The omission of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony, given to the Commission itself, that Vice-President Cheney and others in the underground shelter were aware by 9:26 that an aircraft was approaching the Pentagon (220).
86. The claim that Pentagon officials did not know about an aircraft approaching Pentagon until 9:32, 9:34, or 9:36--in any case, only a few minutes before the building was hit (223).
87. The endorsement of two contradictory stories about the aircraft that hit the Pentagon--one in which it executed a 330-degree downward spiral (a "high-speed dive") and another in which there is no mention of this maneuver (222-23).
88. The claim that the fighter jets from Langley, which were allegedly scrambled to protect Washington from "Phantom Flight 11," were nowhere near Washington because they were mistakenly sent out to sea (223-24).
89. The omission of all the evidence suggesting that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77 (224-25).
90. The claim that the military was not notified by the FAA about Flight 93's hijacking until after it crashed (227-29, 232, 253).
91. The twofold claim that the NMCC did not monitor the FAA-initiated conference and then was unable to get the FAA connected to the NMCC-initiated teleconference (230-31).
92. The omission of the fact that the Secret Service is able to know everything that the FAA knows (233).
93. The omission of any inquiry into why the NMCC initiated its own teleconference if, as Laura Brown of the FAA has said, this is not standard protocol (234).
94. The omission of any exploration of why General Montague Winfield not only had a rookie (Captain Leidig) take over his role as the NMCC's Director of Operations but also left him in charge after it was clear that the Pentagon was facing an unprecedented crisis (235-36).
95. The claim that the FAA (falsely) notified the Secret Service between 10:10 and 10:15 that Flight 93 was still up and headed towards Washington (237).
96. The claim that Vice President Cheney did not give the shoot-down authorization until after 10:10 (several minutes after Flight 93 had crashed) and that this authorization was not transmitted to the US military until 10:31 (237-41).
97. The omission of all the evidence indicating that Flight 93 was shot down by a military plane (238-39, 252-53).
98. The claim that Richard Clarke did not receive the requested shoot-down authorization until 10:25 (240).
99. The omission of Clarke's own testimony, which suggests that he received the shoot-down authorization by 9:50 (240).
100. The claim that Cheney did not reach the underground shelter (the PEOC [Presidential Emergency Operations Center]) until 9:58 (241-44).
101. The omission of multiple testimony, including that of Norman Mineta to the Commission itself, that Cheney was in the PEOC before 9:20 (241-44).
102. The claim that shoot-down authorization must be given by the president (245).
103. The omission of reports that Colonel Marr ordered a shoot-down of Flight 93 and that General Winfield indicated that he and others at the NMCC had expected a fighter jet to reach Flight 93 (252).
104. The omission of reports that there were two fighter jets in the air a few miles from NYC and three of them only 200 miles from Washington (251).
105. The omission of evidence that there were at least six bases with fighters on alert in the northeastern part of the United States (257-58).
106. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had defined its mission in terms of defending only against threats from abroad (258-62).
107. The endorsement of General Myers' claim that NORAD had not recognized the possibility that terrorists might use hijacked airliners as missiles (262-63).
108. The failure to highlight the significance of evidence presented in the Report itself, and to mention other evidence, showing that NORAD had indeed recognized the threat that hijacked airliners might be used as missiles (264-67).
109. The failure to probe the issue of how the "war games" scheduled for that day were related to the military's failure to intercept the hijacked airliners (268-69).
110. The failure to discuss the possible relevance of Operation Northwoods to the attacks of 9/11 (269-71).
111. The claim--made in explaining why the military did not get information about the hijackings in time to intercept them--that FAA personnel inexplicably failed to follow standard procedures some 16 times (155-56, 157, 179, 180, 181, 190, 191, 193, 194, 200, 202-03, 227, 237, 272-75).
112. The failure to point out that the Commission's claimed "independence" was fatally compromised by the fact that its executive director, Philip Zelikow, was virtually a member of the Bush administration (7-9, 11-12, 282-84).
113. The failure to point out that the White House first sought to prevent the creation of a 9/11 Commission, then placed many obstacles in its path, including giving it extremely meager funding (283-85).
114. The failure to point out that the Commission's chairman, most of the other commissioners, and at least half of the staff had serious conflicts of interest (285-90, 292-95).
115. The failure of the Commission, while bragging that it presented its final report "without dissent," to point out that this was probably possible only because Max Cleland, the commissioner who was most critical of the White House and swore that he would not be part of "looking at information only partially," had to resign in order to accept a position with the Export-Import Bank, and that the White House forwarded his nomination for this position only after he was becoming quite outspoken in his criticisms (290-291).
I will close by pointing out that I concluded my study of what I came to call "the Kean-Zelikow Report" by writing that it, "far from lessening my suspicions about official complicity, has served to confirm them. Why would the minds in charge of this final report engage in such deception if they were not trying to cover up very high crimes?" (291)
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SIGNIFICANT PATTERN TO 9/11 REPORT's OMISSIONS & DISTORTIONS
David Ray Griffin
Table of Contents
Introduction
Flights 11 and 175
The Collapse of the Twin Towers
Building 7
Flight 77
The Strike on the Pentagon
Flight 93
The Behavior of the Secret Service with the President
NOTE: This is a transcrpit of testimony delivered by theologian David Ray Griffin to the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference on September 23, 2005.
Testimony at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference 2005 (September 21-24, Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC) for the session, 'The 9/11 Omission: What the Commission Got Wrong,' September 23, 2005, sponsored by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA):
Introduction
There have been two main theories about 9/11, each of which is a conspiracy theory. The official conspiracy theory says that the attacks were planned and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda. The alternative theory says that the attacks could not have succeeded without the involvement of forces within our own government.
In examining The 9/11 Commission Report, I have focused on how it dealt with evidence supportive of the alternative theory. I have found that it did so by distorting or simply ignoring this evidence. This is no surprise, because the man running the Commission, Philip Zelikow,
was essentially a member of the Bush-Cheney administration. But it is a fact that needs to be brought to light.
Because there are so many omissions and distortions---in my book I identified at least 115---I can point to a significant percentage of them only by moving through my representative list quite quickly.
Flights 11 and 175
I will begin with the question of how hijacked airliners could have struck the Twin Towers.
The Commission's answer was the third answer we have been given to that question. The first answer, given by military leaders the first few days after 9/11, was that no fighter jets were sent up until after the Pentagon was struck. The second answer was contained in a timeline put out by NORAD on September 18, one week after 9/11, in which it stated the times at which it had been notified by the FAA about each flight and then the times at which it had fighters scrambled. The Commission failed to mention this change of story.
With regard to Flight 11, the Commission claimed that the military received notification about its hijacking 9 minutes before it struck the north tower. The military was unable to intercept it, however, because Colonel Marr, the head of NEADS---NORAD's Northeast Sector---had to telephone a superior in Florida to get permission, and this call took 8 minutes. The Commission, besides failing to ask how such a call could take so long, also failed to point out that, according to Department of Defense procedures, the call was unnecessary.
With regard to Flight 175, the Commission claimed that the military received no notification about it until after it had struck the south tower (22-23). But NORAD, in its September 18 timeline, had said that notification had been received at 8:43, a full 20 minutes before the south tower was struck. So if the Commission's new story is true, then NORAD officials were either lying or their memories were so bad that they got confused one week after the events. The Commission, however, failed to press this question.
Whenever there is a crisis, the FAA sets up a teleconference with the military. Information about Flight 175's hijacking, it would seem, should have come to the military by means of this teleconference. The Commission, however, claimed that the FAA did not set up this teleconference until 9:20, 17 minutes after Flight 175 had crashed into the south tower (36). In making this claim, however, the Commission failed to mention a memo from the FAA's Laura Brown, which said that the teleconference was established 'within a few minutes' after the first tower was struck, which would have been about 8:50. The memo also said that the FAA conveyed information about all 'flights of interest,' which would have included Flight 175. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste read this memo into the Commission's record during a hearing in 2003. But the Commission's final report pretends that this memo did not exist.
The Commission's claim about the military's ignorance of Flight 175 also ignores a story involving Captain Michael Jellinek, a Canadian who on 9/11 was overseeing NORAD headquarters. According to this story, Jellinek was on the phone with NEADS as he watched Flight 175 crash into the south tower and asked, 'Was that the hijacked aircraft you were dealing with''--to which NEADS said yes.
The Collapse of the Twin Towers
Some more omissions and distortions involve the question of why the Twin Towers collapsed after being struck by the airliners.
The Commission failed to mention that prior to 9/11, fire had never caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse, even when the fires were much bigger, hotter, and longer-lasting than the fires in the towers. It did not mention, in other words, that all previous collapses had been caused by carefully placed explosives in a process called controlled demolition.
The Commission also did not mention that the collapse of each tower had at least 10 features characteristic of controlled demolitions. For example, each collapse (1) began suddenly, (2) came straight down, (3) occurred at virtually free-fall speed, and (4) produced an enormous amount of dust, which happens when explosives pulverize concrete into tiny particles.
Each collapse was also total, with each 110-story building collapsing into a pile of rubble only a few stories high. How such a total collapse could occur---if explosives were not used---is a complete mystery, because the core of each tower consisted of 47 massive steel columns. The main explanation for the collapse is a pancake theory, according to which the floors above the hole created by the plane's impact broke loose from the columns and fell on the floor below, thereby starting a chain reaction. But if this is what happened, the core columns would have still been sticking a thousand feet into the air. The Commission handled this problem by simply denying the existence of these core columns, saying: 'The interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft.' (541n1)
Another standard feature of controlled demolitions is, of course, the occurrence of explosions. The oral histories recorded by the New York Fire Department, which were finally released this past August, contain dozens of testimonies about multiple explosions in both towers, which reinforce previously available testimonies. However, although the Commission had access to the oral histories, it did not quote any of them.
That is too bad, because the authors of the Report obviously like colorful quotations, and the 9/11 oral histories contain some pretty good ones. For example, firefighter Thomas Turilli, referring to the south tower, said that 'it almost sounded like bombs going off, like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight." Paramedic Daniel Rivera, describing what he called a 'frigging noise,' said: 'do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'' That's exactly what . . . I thought it was.' Firefighter Edward Cachia, referring to the collapse of the south tower, said: 'It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. . . [W]e originally had thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.' Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory said: 'I thought . . . before . . . No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes. . . . I . . . saw a flash flash flash . . . [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they . . . blow up a building. . . '' Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: '[T]here was just an explosion. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.'
The question of whether explosives had been used could have been settled by a scientific examination of the steel columns. However, even though removing evidence from a crime scene is usually a federal offense, the authorities allowed the steel to be quickly removed and sold as scrap metal. This removal was protested by the New York Times and Fire Engineering magazine. The 9/11 Commission, however, said nothing about it.
The Commission also failed to mention Mayor Giuliani's statement, made to Peter Jennings, that he had learned in advance that one of the towers was going to collapse. The Commission did not, therefore, need to ask Giuliani why anyone, prior to the collapse of the south tower, would have expected it to collapse, given the fact that there was no objective evidence or historical precedent for such a collapse.
The Commission also did not mention that the CEO of the company that was in charge of security for the World Trade Center was Wirt Walker III, the president's cousin, or that Marvin Bush, the president's brother, had been one of this company's directors.
Building 7
The Commission also omitted many vital facts about the collapse of building 7. This collapse is especially important, because the collapses of the Twin Towers are usually attributed partly to the impact of the airplanes, but building 7 was not struck by a plane and yet it collapsed in essentially the same way, showing all the signs of a controlled demolition. The Commission did not mention these facts.
It also did not mention that firefighters were removed from building 7 several hours in advance because someone spread word that it was going to collapse, even though there were, according to all available photographs, fires on only a few of this building's 47 floors. The Commission again could have included some interesting quotations from the 9/11 oral histories. For example, Decosta Wright, a medical technician, said: 'I think the fourth floor was on fire. . . . [W]e were like, are you guys going to put that fire out'' Chief Thomas McCarthy said: '[T]hey were waiting for 7 World Trade to come down. . . . They had . . . fire on three separate floors . . . , just burning merrily. It was pretty amazing, you know, it's the afternoon in lower Manhattan, a major high-rise is burning, and they said 'we know.'' But the Commission says nothing about this decision not to fight the fires, based on advance knowledge that the building was going to collapse.
The Commission also did not mention that Larry Silverstein, the building's owner, said on a PBS show that he and the 'fire department commander' decided it would be best to 'pull' the building, after which 'we watched the building collapse.'
The Commission avoided pointing out any of these things by simply not finding any room in its 571-page book to mention the fact that building 7 collapsed---even though it was supposedly the first large steel-frame building in history to collapse from fire alone.
Flight 77
There are also many omissions and distortions related to Flight 77.
According to the Commission's new timeline, the FAA did not notify the military about Flight 77 before it struck the Pentagon (34). NORAD's previous timeline, to be sure, had said that the FAA had provided this notification at 9:24. Critics had then pointed out that this notification, coming 14 minutes before the Pentagon was struck, meant that the military should have been able to prevent the strike. The Commission's new story avoids this problem by simply declaring NORAD's earlier statement 'incorrect' (34), again ignoring the question of whether NORAD officials had been lying or were simply afflicted by terrible memories.
Another problem for the Commission's claim is that there were three teleconferences going on by then. Why did the military not learn about Flight 77 from, for example, the FAA's teleconference, which even the Commission agreed began by 9:20' Because, we are told, the person at the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon who was assigned to this teleconference found it worthless and hence didn't pay attention (36). This account, however, ignores Laura Brown's memo, which reported that the FAA had connected with both the Pentagon and NORAD, with which the FAA shared 'real-time information' about 'all the flights of interest, including Flight 77.' Her memo said, in other words, that the FAA had told the military about Flight 77 long before 9:24. Commissioner Ben-Veniste commented on the significance of this statement at the hearing in which he read the memo into the record. But the Commission wrote its final report as if this memo did not exist.
The Commission also had another problem. Fighters had clearly taken off from Langley Air Force Base at 9:30 that morning. NORAD had said that they were sent up after it had received notification about Flight 77's hijacking at 9:24. The Commission handled this problem by simply declaring NORAD'S statement 'incorrect' (34). But then the Commission had to explain why the Langley jets took off at 9:30. The Commission did this by means of a new concept, 'phantom Flight 11.' That is, the Langley fighters were really scrambled in response to a false report from the FAA that Flight 11 was still aloft and headed towards Washington (26). The proof of this claim, we are assured, is provided by an audiofile on which someone from the FAA center in Boston told someone at NEADS about this flight. No reporter can confirm this story, however, because the Commission was 'unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information' (26). But the Commission failed to explain why, given the sophisticated voice identification techniques now available, it could not identify the two individuals on this audiofile.
The Strike on the Pentagon
I turn now to problems in the Commission's treatment of the strike on the Pentagon.
The Commission claimed that no one knew that an aircraft was heading towards Washington until about 9:36, just a couple minutes before it struck the Pentagon (34). But Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta had reported a conversation showing that Vice President Cheney, along with others in the shelter conference room under the White House, knew at least 10 minutes earlier that an aircraft was approaching. The Commission, in claiming otherwise, simply made no mention of Mineta's report, even though it was given in open testimony to the Commission itself.
The Commission also failed to deal with many problems in the claim that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was Flight 77 under the control of Hani Hanjour.
For example, the aircraft, in order to hit the west wing, reportedly executed a downward spiral that would have been difficult for an accomplished pilot, and yet Hanjour was known as a terrible pilot. The Commission handled this problem by admitting Hanjour's deficiencies on some pages (225-26, 242) while claiming elsewhere that he was given this assignment because he was 'the operation's most experienced pilot' (530n147).
The Commission also failed to point out that if terrorists had wanted to cause maximal death and destruction, the west wing would have been their last choice: it had been reinforced, so the damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been; it was still being renovated, so relatively few people were killed; and the secretary of defense and all the top brass, whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east wing, as far removed from the west wing as possible.
The Commission also failed to discuss several factors that have led some critics to conclude that the aircraft that hit the Pentagon was not even a Boeing 757. This controversy could be cleared up by simply showing the videos that were confiscated from the security cameras at the nearby Sheraton Hotel and the Citgo gas station across the freeway. But the Commission failed to subpoena them or even to mention their existence.
Finally, the Commission claimed that al-Qaeda hijackers did not strike a nuclear plant because they feared that their plane would be shot down by an anti-aircraft defense system (36). But the Commission failed to discuss whether the Pentagon is not protected by some such system, which would normally shoot down any aircraft without a US military transponder.
Flight 93
There are also many serious omissions and distortions in the Commission's treatment of Flight 93.
One thing omitted is considerable evidence that Flight 93 was shot down by our own military.
The Commission addressed this question only indirectly'-by constructing another new timeline, according to which the military did not learn about the hijacking of Flight 93 until after it had crashed. This claim, however, required ignoring Laura Brown's memo on more time.
The Commission also claimed that the military could not have learned about Flight 93 from the White House videoconference organized by Richard Clarke because it did not include 'the right officials from both the FAA and the Defense Department' (37). But Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, states that the FAA was represented by its head, Jane Garvey, and that the Defense Department was represented by Secretary Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, who was then Acting Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These were surely the 'right people.' Clarke says, moreover, that Garvey's list of potential hijacks, which she read while Myers and Rumsfeld were listening, included 'United 93 over Pennsylvania.'
The Commission also claimed that it did 'not know who from Defense participated' in Clarke's videoconference (36). That unbelievable statement perhaps had something to do with the fact that Myers claimed that he was on Capitol Hill that morning at just the time that Clarke's book had him in the Pentagon participating in the White House videoconference. The Commission simply endorsed Myers' claim (463n199), failing to point out its conflict with Clarke's account.
In any case, the Commission's new timeline also claimed that the shoot-down order was not issued by Cheney until after 10:10 (237-38), hence 7 or more minutes after Flight 93 had crashed, and that the order was not received by Richard Clarke until 10:25 (37). The Commission omitted the fact, however, that Clarke himself said that he received the order at about 9:50.
The Commission also failed to mention that, according to ABC News, Colonel Marr at NEADS received the shoot-down order and then instructed fighter pilots to destroy the airliner, saying: 'United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington, D.C.' The Commission also did not mention that CBS News and even Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, reported that military fighters were on Flight 93's tail.
Another part of the Commission's new timeline is its claim that the vice president did not arrive in the shelter conference room until 'shortly before 10:00' (40). In making this claim, however, the Commission had to ignore many previous reports, including Norman Mineta's testimony, to the Commission itself, that Cheney was already in charge down there when Mineta arrived at 9:20.
The Behavior of the Secret Service with the President
I will conclude with the Commission's treatment of the behavior of the Secret Service agents with President Bush. The president was in a classroom in Sarasota when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center, clear evidence that terrorists were using hijacked airliners to attack high-value targets. There was no higher-value target than the president, and his location had been widely publicized. Secret Service protocol called for the agents to rush the president to a predetermined safe location. And yet they allowed him to remain at the school another half hour and even to address the nation on television, thereby letting any terrorists know he was still there. The 9/11 Commission's only comment about this remarkable incident was to report that '[t]he Secret Service told us they . . . did not think it imperative for [the President] to run out the door.' The apparent implication of the Secret Service agents' behavior---that they knew that the president was not a target---went unmentioned by the Commission, like all the other evidence pointing to official complicity in the attacks.
This is part of the evidence that has led me to the conclusion that The 9/11 Commission Report is a 571-page lie.
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THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER:
WHY THE OFFICIAL ACCOUNT CANNOT BE TRUE
David Ray Griffin
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/nyc1.html
In The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), I summarized dozens of facts and reports that cast doubt on the official story about 9/11. Then in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005a), I discussed the way these various facts and reports were treated by the 9/11 Commission, namely, by distorting or simply omitting them. I have also taken this big-picture approach, with its cumulative argument, in my previous essays and lectures on 9/11 (Griffin, 2005b and 2005d).[1] This approach, which shows every aspect of the official story to be problematic, provides the most effective challenge to the official story.
But this way of presenting the evidence has one great limitation, especially when used in lectures and essays: It means that the treatment of every particular issue must be quite brief, hence superficial. People can thereby be led to suspect that a more thorough treatment of any particular issue might show the official story to be plausible after all.
In the present essay, I focus on one question: why the Twin Towers and building 7 of the World Trade Center collapsed. One advantage of this focus, besides the fact that it allows us to go into considerable detail, is that the destruction of the World Trade Center provides one of the best windows into the truth about 9/11. Another advantage of this focus is that it will allow us to look at revelations contained in the 9/11 oral histories, which were recorded by the New York Fire Department shortly after 9/11 but released to the public only in August of 2005.
I will begin with the question of why the Twin Towers collapsed, then raise the same question about building 7.
1. The Collapse of the Twin Towers
Shortly after 9/11, President Bush advised people not to tolerate “outrageous conspiracy theories about the attacks of 11 September” (Bush, 2001).[2] Philip Zelikow, who directed the work of the 9/11 Commission, has likewise warned against “outrageous conspiracy theories” (Hansen, 2005). What do these men mean by this expression? They cannot mean that we should reject all conspiracy theories about 9/11, because the government’s own account is a conspiracy theory, with the conspirators all being members of al-Qaeda. They mean only that we should reject outrageous theories.
But what distinguishes an outrageous theory from a non-outrageous one? This is one of the central questions in the philosophy of science. When confronted by rival theories---let’s say Neo-Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design---scientists and philosophers of science ask which theory is better and why. The mark of a good theory is that it can explain, in a coherent way, all or at least most of the relevant facts and is not contradicted by any of them. A bad theory is one that is contradicted by some of the relevant facts. An outrageous theory would be one that is contradicted by virtually all the relevant facts.
With this definition in mind, let us look at the official theory about the Twin Towers, which says that they collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires. The report put out by FEMA said: “The structural damage sustained by each tower from the impact, combined with the ensuing fires, resulted in the total collapse of each building” (FEMA, 2002).[3] This theory clearly belongs in the category of outrageous theories, because is it is contradicted by virtually all the relevant facts. Although this statement may seem extreme, I will explain why it is not.
No Prior Collapse Induced by Fire
The official theory is rendered implausible by two major problems. The first is the simple fact that fire has never---prior to or after 9/11---caused steel-frame high-rise buildings to collapse. Defenders of the official story seldom if ever mention this simple fact. Indeed, the supposedly definitive report put out by NIST---the National Institute for Standards and Technology (2005)---even implies that fire-induced collapses of large steel-frame buildings are normal events (Hoffman, 2005).[4] Far from being normal, however, such collapses have never occurred, except for the alleged cases of 9/11.
Defenders of the official theory, of course, say that the collapses were caused not simply by the fire but the fire combined with the damage caused by the airliners. The towers, however, were designed to withstand the impact of airliners about the same size as Boeing 767s.[5] Hyman Brown, the construction manager of the Twin Towers, said: “They were over-designed to withstand almost anything, including hurricanes, . . . bombings and an airplane hitting [them]” (Bollyn, 2001). And even Thomas Eagar, an MIT professor of materials engineering who supports the official theory, says that the impact of the airplanes would not have been significant, because “the number of columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant structure” (Eagar and Musso, 2001, pp. 8-11). Likewise, the NIST Report, in discussing how the impact of the planes contributed to the collapse, focuses primarily on the claim that the planes dislodged a lot of the fire-proofing from the steel.[6]
The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse---never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York City---never.
One might say, of course, that there is a first time for everything, and that a truly extraordinary fire might induce a collapse. Let us examine this idea. What would count as an extraordinary fire? Given the properties of steel, a fire would need to be very hot, very big, and very long-lasting. But the fires in the towers did not have even one of these characteristics, let alone all three.
There have been claims, to be sure, that the fires were very hot. Some television specials claimed that the towers collapsed because the fire was hot enough to melt the steel. For example, an early BBC News special quoted Hyman Brown as saying: “steel melts, and 24,000 gallons of aviation fluid melted the steel.” Another man, presented as a structural engineer, said: “It was the fire that killed the buildings. There’s nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. . . . The columns would have melted” (Barter, 2001).[7]
These claims, however, are absurd. Steel does not even begin to melt until it reaches almost 2800° Fahrenheit.[8] And yet open fires fueled by hydrocarbons, such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel is---can at most rise to 1700°F, which is almost 1100 degrees below the melting point of steel.[9] We can, accordingly, dismiss the claim that the towers collapsed because their steel columns melted.[10]
Most defenders of the official theory, in fact, do not make this absurd claim. They say merely that the fire heated the steel up to the point where it lost so much of its strength that it buckled.[11] For example, Thomas Eagar, saying that steel loses 80 percent of its strength when it is heated to 1,300?F, argues that this is what happened. But for even this claim to plausible, the fires would have still had to be pretty hot.
But they were not. Claims have been made, as we have seen, about the jet fuel. But much of it burned up very quickly in the enormous fireballs produced when the planes hit the buildings, and rest was gone within 10 minutes,[12] after which the flames died down. Photographs of the towers 15 minutes after they were struck show few flames and lots of black smoke, a sign that the fires were oxygen-starved. Thomas Eagar, recognizing this fact, says that the fires were “probably only about 1,200 or 1,300?F” (Eagar, 2002).
There are reasons to believe, moreover, that the fires were not even that hot. As photographs show, the fires did not break windows or even spread much beyond their points of origin (Hufschmid, 2002, p. 40). This photographic evidence is supported by scientific studies carried out by NIST, which found that of the 16 perimeter columns examined, “only three columns had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250?C [482?F],” and no evidence that any of the core columns had reached even those temperatures (2005, p. 88).
NIST (2005) says that it “did not generalize these results, since the examined columns represented only 3 percent of the perimeter columns and 1 percent of the core columns from the fire floors”. That only such a tiny percent of the columns was available was due, of course, to the fact that government officials had most of the steel immediately sold and shipped off. In any case, NIST’s findings on the basis of this tiny percent of the columns are not irrelevant: They mean that any speculations that some of the core columns reached much higher temperatures would be just that---pure speculation not backed up by any empirical evidence.
Moreover, even if the fire had reached 1,300?F, as Eagar supposes, that does not mean that any of the steel would have reached that temperature. Steel is an excellent conductor of heat. Put a fire to one part of a long bar of steel and the heat will quickly diffuse to the other parts and to any other pieces of steel to which that bar is connected.[13]
For fires to have heated up some of the steel columns to anywhere close to their own temperature, they would have needed to be very big, relative to the size of the buildings and the amount of steel in them. The towers, of course, were huge and had an enormous amount of steel. A small, localized fire of 1,300?F would never have heated any of the steel columns even close to that temperature, because the heat would have been quickly dispersed throughout the building.
Some defenders of the official story have claimed that the fires were indeed very big, turning the buildings into “towering infernos.” But all the evidence counts against this claim, especially with regard to the south tower, which collapsed first. This tower was struck between floors 78 and 84, so that region is where the fire would have been the biggest. And yet Brian Clark, a survivor, said that when he got down to the 80th floor: "You could see through the wall and the cracks and see flames . . . just licking up, not a roaring inferno, just quiet flames licking up and smoke sort of eking through the wall."[14] Likewise, one of the fire chiefs who had reached the 78th floor found only “two isolated pockets of fire.”[15]
The north tower, to be sure, did have fires that were big enough and hot enough to cause many people to jump to their deaths. But as anyone with a fireplace grate or a pot-belly stove knows, fire that will not harm steel or even iron will burn human flesh. Also in many cases it may have been more the smoke than the heat that led people to jump.
In any case, the fires, to weaken the steel columns, would have needed to be not only very big and very hot but also very long-lasting.[16] The public was told that the towers had such fires, with CNN saying that “very intense” fires “burned for a long time.”[17] But they did not. The north tower collapsed an hour and 42 minutes after it was struck; the south tower collapsed after only 56 minutes.
To see how ludicrous is the claim that the short-lived fires in the towers could have induced structural collapse, we can compare them with some other fires. In 1988, a fire in the First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles raged for 3.5 hours and gutted 5 of this building’s 62 floors, but there was no significant structural damage (FEMA, 1988). In 1991, a huge fire in Philadelphia’s One Meridian Plaza lasted for 18 hours and gutted 8 of the building’s 38 floors, but, said the FEMA report, although “[b]eams and girders sagged and twisted . . . under severe fire exposures. . . , the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage” (FEMA, 1991). In Caracas in 2004, a fire in a 50-story building raged for 17 hours, completely gutting the building’s top 20 floors, and yet it did not collapse (Nieto, 2004). And yet we are supposed to believe that a 56-minute fire caused the south tower to collapse. [/b]
Unlike the fires in the towers, moreover, the fires in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Caracas were hot enough to break windows.
Another important comparison is afforded by a series of experiments run in Great Britain in the mid-1990s to see what kind of damage could be done to steel-frame buildings by subjecting them to extremely hot, all-consuming fires that lasted for many hours. FEMA, having reviewed those experiments, said: “Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900°C (1,500-1,700°F) in three of the tests. . . , no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments” (1988, Appendix A).
These comparisons bring out the absurdity of NIST’s claim that the towers collapsed because the planes knocked the fireproofing off the steel columns. Fireproofing provides protection for only a few hours, so the steel in the buildings in Philadelphia and Caracas would have been directly exposed to raging fires for 14 or more hours, and yet this steel did not buckle. NIST claims, nevertheless, that the steel in the south tower buckled because it was directly exposed to flames for 56 minutes.[18]
A claim made by some defenders of the official theory is to speculate that there was something about the Twin Towers that made them uniquely vulnerable to fire. But these speculations are not backed up by any evidence. And, as Norman Glover, has pointed out: “[A]lmost all large buildings will be the location for a major fire in their useful life. No major high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire. The WTC was the location for such a fire in 1975; however, the building survived with minor damage and was repaired and returned to service” (Glover, 2002).
Multiple Evidence of Controlled Demolition
There is a reverse truth to the fact that, aside from the alleged cases of 9/11, fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse. This reverse truth is that every previous total collapse has been caused by the procedure known as “controlled demolition,” in which explosives capable of cutting steel have been placed in crucial places throughout the building and then set off in a particular order. Just from knowing that the towers collapsed, therefore, the natural assumption would be that they were brought down by explosives.
This a priori assumption is, moreover, supported by an empirical examination of the particular nature of the collapses. Here we come to the second major problem with the official theory, namely, that the collapses had at least eleven features that would be expected if, and only if, explosives were used. I will briefly describe these eleven features.
Sudden Onset: In controlled demolition, the onset of the collapse is sudden. One moment, the building is perfectly motionless; the next moment, it suddenly begins to collapse. But steel, when heated, does not suddenly buckle or break. So in fire-induced collapses---if we had any examples of such---the onset would be gradual. Horizontal beams and trusses would begin to sag; vertical columns, if subjected to strong forces, would begin to bend. But as videos of the towers show,[19] there were no signs of bending or sagging, even on the floors just above the damage caused by the impact of the planes. The buildings were perfectly motionless up to the moment they began their collapse.
Straight Down: The most important thing in a controlled demolition of a tall building close to other buildings is that it come straight down, into, or at least close to, its own footprint, so that it does not harm the other buildings. The whole art or science of controlled demolition is oriented primarily around this goal. As Mark Loizeaux, the president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has explained, “to bring [a building] down as we want, so . . . no other structure is harmed,” the demolition must be “completely planned,” using “the right explosive [and] the right pattern of laying the charges” (Else, 2004).[20] If the 110-story Twin Towers had fallen over, they would have caused an enormous amount of damage to buildings covering many city blocks. But the towers came straight down. Accordingly, the official theory, by implying that fire produced collapses that perfectly mimicked the collapses that have otherwise been produced only by precisely placed explosives, requires a miracle.[21]
Almost Free-Fall Speed: Buildings brought down by controlled demolition collapse at almost free-fall speed. This can occur because the supports for the lower floors are destroyed, so that when the upper floors come down, they encounter no resistance. The fact that the collapses of the towers mimicked this feature of controlled demolition was mentioned indirectly by The 9/11 Commission Report, which said that the “South Tower collapsed in 10 seconds” (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, p. 305).[22] The authors of the report evidently thought that the rapidity of this collapse did not conflict with the official theory, known as the “pancake” theory. According to this theory, the floors above the floors that were weakened by the impact of the airliner fell on the floor below, which started a chain reaction, so that the floors “pancaked” all the way down.
But if that is what happened, the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, would have provided resistance. The upper floors could not have fallen through them at the same speed as they would fall through air. However, the videos of the collapses show that the rubble falling inside the building’s profile falls at the same speed as the rubble outside[23] (Jones, 2006). As Dave Heller, a builder with degrees in physics and architecture, explains:
the floors could not have been pancaking. The buildings fell too quickly. The floors must all have been falling simultaneously to reach the ground in such a short amount of time. But how?. . . In [the method known as controlled demolition], each floor of a building is destroyed at just the moment the floor above is about to strike it. Thus, the floors fall simultaneously, and in virtual freefall. (Garlic and Glass 6)
Total Collapse: The official theory is even more decisively ruled out by the fact that the collapses were total: These 110-story buildings collapsed into piles of rubble only a few stories high. How was that possible? The core of each tower contained 47 massive steel box columns.[24] According to the pancake theory, the horizontal steel supports broke free from the vertical columns. But if that is what had happened, the 47 core columns would have still been standing. The 9/11 Commission came up with a bold solution to this problem. It simply denied the existence of the 47 core columns, saying: “The interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and stairwells were grouped” (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, 541 note 1). Voila! With no 47 core columns, the main problem is removed.
The NIST Report handled this most difficult problem by claiming that when the floors collapsed, they pulled on the columns, causing the perimeter columns to become unstable. This instability then increased the gravity load on the core columns, which had been weakened by tremendously hot fires in the core, which, NIST claims, reached 1832°F, and this combination of factors somehow produced “global collapse” (NIST, 2005, pp. 28, 143).
This theory faces two problems. First, NIST’s claim about tremendously hot fires in the core is completely unsupported by evidence. As we saw earlier, its own studies found no evidence that any of the core columns had reached temperatures of even 482°F (250?C), so its theory involves a purely speculative addition of over 1350°F.[25] Second, even if this sequence of events had occurred, NIST provides no explanation as to why it would have produced global—-that is, total--collapse. The NIST Report asserts that “column failure” occurred in the core as well as the perimeter columns. But this remains a bare assertion. There is no plausible explanation of why the columns would have broken or even buckled, so as to produce global collapse at virtually free-fall speed, even if they had reached such temperatures.[26]
Sliced Steel: In controlled demolitions of steel-frame buildings, explosives are used to slice the steel columns and beams into pieces. A representative from Controlled Demolition, Inc., has said of RDX, one of the commonly used high explosives, that it slices steel like a "razor blade through a tomato." The steel is, moreover, not merely sliced; it is sliced into manageable lengths. As Controlled Demolition, Inc., says in its publicity: “Our DREXSTM systems . . . segment steel components into pieces matching the lifting capacity of the available equipment.”[27]
The collapses of the Twin Towers, it seems, somehow managed to mimic this feature of controlled demolitions as well. Jim Hoffman (2004), after studying various photos of the collapse site, said that much of the steel seemed to be “chopped up into . . . sections that could be easily loaded onto the equipment that was cleaning up Ground Zero.”[28]
Pulverization of Concrete and Other Materials: Another feature of controlled demolition is the production of a lot of dust, because explosives powerful enough to slice steel will pulverize concrete and most other non-metallic substances into tiny particles. And, Hoffman (2003) reports, “nearly all of the non-metallic constituents of the towers were pulverized into fine power.”[29] That observation was also made by Colonel John O’Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “At the World Trade Center sites,” he told the History Channel, “it seemed like everything was pulverized” (History Channel, 2002).
This fact creates a problem for the official theory, according to which the only energy available was the gravitational energy. This energy would have been sufficient to break most of the concrete into fairly small pieces. But it would not have been anywhere close to the amount of energy needed to turn the concrete and virtually all the non-metallic contents of the buildings into tiny particles of dust.
Dust Clouds: Yet another common feature of controlled demolitions is the production of dust clouds, which result when explosions eject the dust from the building with great energy. And, as one can see by comparing videos on the Web, the collapses of the towers produced clouds that are very similar to those produced by controlled demolitions of other structures, such as Seattle’s Kingdome. The only difference is that the clouds produced during the collapses of the towers were proportionally much bigger.[30]
The question of the source of the needed energy again arises. Hoffman (2003), focusing on the expansion of the North Tower’s dust cloud, calculates that the energy required simply for this expansion---ignoring the energy needed to slice the steel and pulverize the concrete and other materials---exceeded by at least 10 times the gravitational energy available.
The official account, therefore, involves a huge violation of the laws of physics---a violation that becomes even more enormous once we factor in the energy required to pulverize the concrete (let alone the energy required to break the steel).
Besides the sheer quantity of energy needed, another problem with the official theory is that gravitational energy is wholly unsuited to explain the production of these dust clouds. This is most obviously the case in the first few seconds. In Hoffman’s words: “You can see thick clouds of pulverized concrete being ejected within the first two seconds. That’s when the relative motion of the top of the tower to the intact portion was only a few feet per second.”[31] Jeff King (2003), in the same vein, says: “[A great amount of] very fine concrete dust is ejected from the top of the building very early in the collapse. . . [when] concrete slabs [would have been] bumping into each other at [only] 20 or 30 mph.”
The importance of King’s point can be appreciated by juxtaposing it with the claim by Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead investigator, that although the clouds of dust created during the collapses of the Twin Towers may create the impression of a controlled demolition, “it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception" (Popular Mechanics, 2005). The pancaking, according to the official theory being defended by Sunder, began at the floor beneath the holes created by the impact of the airliners. As King points out, this theory cannot handle the fact, as revealed by the photographs and videos, that dust clouds were created far above the impact zones.
Horizontal Ejections: Another common feature of controlled demolition is the horizontal ejection of other materials, besides dust, from those areas of the building in which explosives are set off. In the case of the Twin Towers, photos and videos reveal that “[h]eavy pieces of steel were ejected in all directions for distances up to 500 feet, while aluminum cladding was blown up to 700 feet away from the towers” (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 7). But gravitational energy is, of course, vertical, so it cannot even begin to explain these horizontal ejections.
Demolition Rings: Still another common feature of collapses induced by explosions are demolition rings, in which series of small explosions run rapidly around a building. This feature was also manifested by the collapses of the towers.[32]
Sounds Produced by Explosions: The use of explosives to induce collapses produces, of course, sounds caused by the explosions. Like all the previous features except the slicing of the steel columns inside the building, this one could be observed by witnesses. And, as we will see below, there is abundant testimony to the existence of such sounds before and during the collapses of the towers.
Molten Steel: An eleventh feature that would be expected only if explosives were used to slice the steel columns would be molten steel, and its existence at the WTC site was indeed reported by several witnesses, including the two main figures involved in the clean up, Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction, and Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Incorporated. Tully said that he saw pools of “literally molten steel” at the site. Loizeaux said that several weeks after 9/11, when the rubble was being removed, “hot spots of molten steel” were found “at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels” (both statements quoted in Bollyn, 2004).[33]
Leslie Robertson, a member of the engineering firm that designed the Twin Towers, said: “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running” (Williams, 2001). Knight-Ridder journalist Jennifer Lin, discussing Joe "Toolie" O'Toole, a Bronx firefighter who worked for many months on the rescue and clean-up efforts, wrote: "Underground fires raged for months. O'Toole remembers in February seeing a crane lift a steel beam vertically from deep within the catacombs of Ground Zero. 'It was dripping from the molten steel," he said'" (Lin, 2002). Greg Fuchek, vice president of sales for LinksPoint, Inc., which supplied some of the computer equipment used to identify human remains at the site, described the working conditions as "hellish," partly because for six months, the ground temperature varied between 600 degrees Fahrenheit and 1,500 degrees or higher. Fuchek added that "sometimes when a worker would pull a steel beam from the wreckage, the end of the beam would be dripping molten steel" (Walsh, 2002). And still more witnesses spoke of molten steel.[34]
This testimony is of great significance, since it would be hard to imagine what, other than high explosives, could have caused some of the steel to melt.
The importance of the nature of the collapses, as summarized in these 11 features, is shown by the fact that attempts to defend the official theory typically ignore most of them. For example, an article in Popular Mechanics (2005), seeking to debunk what it calls some of the most prevalent myths about 9/11 fabricated by “conspiracy theorists,” completely ignores the suddenness, verticality, rapidity, and totality of the collapses and also fails to mention the testimonies about molten steel, demolition rings, and the sounds of explosions.[35]
2. Testimonies about Explosions and Related Phenomena
in the 9/11 Oral Histories
Most of these 11 features---all but the slicing of the core columns and the molten steel in the basements---are features that, if they occurred before or during the collapses of the towers, could have been observed by people in the area. And, in fact, testimonies about some of these phenomena have been available, since shortly after 9/11, from reporters,[36] fire fighters,[37] police officers,[38] people who worked in the towers,[39] and one prominent explosives expert, Van Romero, [40] who said on that very day after viewing the videotapes, that the collapses not only resembled those produced by controlled implosions but must, in fact, have been caused by “some explosive devices inside the buildings” because they were “too methodical” to have been chance results of the airplane strikes (Uyttebrouck, 2001).[41] Some of these testimonies were very impressive. There were, however, only a few of them and they were scattered here and there. No big body of testimony was readily accessible.
But this situation has dramatically changed. Shortly after 9/11, the New York Fire Department recorded over 500 oral histories, in which firefighters and emergency medical workers recounted their experiences of that day. [Emergency Medical Services had become a division within the Fire Department(Dwyer, 2005a).] Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, however, refused to release them. But then the New York Times, joined by several families of 9/11 victims, filed suit and, after a long process, the New York Court of Appeals ordered the city to release the bulk of these oral histories, which it did in August 2005[42] (Dwyer, 2005b). The Times then made them publicly available (NYT, 2005).[43]
These oral histories contain many dozens of testimonies that speak of explosions and related phenomena characteristic of controlled demolition. I will give some examples.
Explosions
Several individuals reported that they witnessed an explosion just before one of the towers collapsed. Battalion Chief John Sudnik said: “we heard . . . what sounded like a loud explosion and looked up and I saw tower two start coming down” (NYT, Sudnick, p. 4).
Several people reported multiple explosions. Paramedic Kevin Darnowski said: "I heard three explosions, and then . . . tower two started to come down” (NYT, Darnowski, p. 8).
Firefighter Thomas Turilli said, “it almost sounded like bombs going off, like boom, boom, boom, like seven or eight" (NYT, Turilli, p. 4).
Craig Carlsen said that he and other firefighters “heard explosions coming from . . . the south tower. . . . There were about ten explosions. . . . We then realized the building started to come down” (NYT, Carlsen, pp. 5-6).
Firefighter Joseph Meola said, “it looked like the building was blowing out on all four sides. We actually heard the pops" (NYT, Meola, p. 5).
Paramedic Daniel Rivera also mentioned “pops.” Asked how he knew that the south tower was coming down, he said:
It was a frigging noise. At first I thought it was---do you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'? . . . I thought it was that. (NYT, Rivera, p. 9)
Collapse Beginning below the Strike Zone and Fire
According to the official account, the “pancaking” began when the floors above the hole caused by the airplane fell on the floors below. Some witnesses reported, however, that the collapse of the south tower began somewhat lower.
Timothy Burke said that “the building popped, lower than the fire. . . . I was going oh, my god, there is a secondary device because the way the building popped. I thought it was an explosion” (NYT, Burke, pp. 8-9).
Firefighter Edward Cachia said: “It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit. . . . [W]e originally had thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives, because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down” (NYT, Cachia, p. 5).
The importance of these observations is reinforced by the fact that the authors of the NIST Report, after having released a draft to the public, felt the need to add the following statement to the Executive Summary:
NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001. . . . Instead, photos and videos from several angles clearly showed that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward.
Firefighters Burke and Cachia presumably now need to ask themselves: What are you going to believe, your own eyes or an official government report?
Flashes and Demolition Rings
Some of the witnesses spoke of flashes and of phenomena suggestive of demolition rings. Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory said: “I thought . . . before . . . No. 2 came down, that I saw low-level flashes. . . . I . . . saw a flash flash flash . . . [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building?” (NYT, Gregory, pp. 14-16).
Captain Karin Deshore said: “Somewhere around the middle . . . there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. . . . [W]ith each popping sound it was initially an orange and then a red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building" (NYT, Deshore, p. 15).
Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: “[T]here was just an explosion. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions” (NYT, Banaciski, pp. 3-4)[b].
Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick said: “It looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building. . . . My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV" (NYT, Fitzpatrick, pp. 13-14).
Horizontal Ejections
A few witnesses spoke of horizontal ejections. Chief Frank Cruthers said: “There was what appeared to be . . . an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse” (NYT, Cruthers, p. 4).
This testimony is important, because the official theory holds that the ejections were produced by the floors collapsing. So listen to firefighter James Curran, who said: “I looked back and . . . I heard like every floor went chu-chu-chu. I looked back and from the pressure everything was getting blown out of the floors before it actually collapsed" (NYT, Curran, pp. 10-11).
Battalion Chief Brian Dixon said, “the lowest floor of fire in the south tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it because . . . everything blew out on the one floor" (NYT, Dixon, p. 15).[44]
Synchronized Explosions
Some witnesses said that the explosions seemed to be synchronized. For example, firefighter Kenneth Rogers said, “there was an explosion in the south tower. . . . I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another . . . t looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing" ([i]NYT[/i], Rogers, pp. 3-4).[45]
Why Does the Public Not Know of These Reports?
If all these firefighters and medical workers witnessed all these phenomena suggestive of controlled demolition, it might be wondered why the public does not know this. Part of the answer is provided by Auxiliary Lieutenant Fireman Paul Isaac. Having said that “there were definitely bombs in those buildings,” Isaac added that “many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings, but they’re afraid for their jobs to admit it because the ‘higher-ups’ forbid discussion of this fact” (Lavello, n.d.). Another part of the answer is that when a few people, like Isaac and William Rodriguez, have spoken out, the mainstream press has failed to report their statements. [/b]
3. Implications
The official theory about the collapse of the towers, I have suggested, is rendered extremely implausible by two main facts. First, aside from the alleged exception of 9/11, steel-frame high-rise buildings have never been caused to collapse by fire; all such collapses have all been produced by carefully placed explosives. Second, the collapses of the Twin Towers manifested at least 11 characteristic features of controlled demolitions. The probability that any of these features would occur in the absence of explosives is extremely low. The probability that all 11 of them would occur is essentially zero.[46]
We can say, therefore, that the official theory about the towers is disproved about as thoroughly as such a theory possibly could be, whereas all the evidence can be explained by the alternative theory, according to which the towers were brought down by explosives. The official theory is, accordingly, an outrageous theory, whereas the alternative theory is, from a scientific point of view, the only reasonable theory available.[47]
4. Other Suspicious Facts
Moreover, although we have already considered sufficient evidence for the theory that the towers were brought down by explosives, there is still more.
[i]Removal of the Steel: For one thing, the steel from the buildings was quickly removed before it could be properly examined,[48] with virtually all of it being sold to scrap dealers, who put most of it on ships to Asia.[49] Generally, removing any evidence from the scene of a crime is a federal offense. But in this case, federal officials facilitated the removal.[50]
This removal evoked protest. On Christmas day, 2001, the New York Times said: “The decision to rapidly recycle the steel columns, beams and trusses from the WTC in the days immediately after 9/11 means definitive answers may never be known.”[51] The next week, Fire Engineering magazine said: “We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence (Brannigan, Corbett, and Dunn, 2002). . . . The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately” (Manning, 2002).
However, Mayor Bloomberg, defending the decision to dispose of the steel, said: "If you want to take a look at the construction methods and the design, that's in this day and age what computers do.[52] Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything."[53] But that is not true. An examination of the steel could have revealed whether it had been cut by explosives. [/i]
This removal of an unprecedented amount of material from a crime scene suggests that an unprecedented crime was being covered up.[54]
Evidence that this cover-up was continued by NIST is provided by its treatment of a provocative finding reported by FEMA, which was that some of the specimens of steel were “rapidly corroded by sulfidation” (FEMA 2002, Appendix C). This report is significant, because sulfidation is an effect of explosives. FEMA appropriately called for further investigation of this finding, which the New York Times called “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” (Killough-Miller, 2002). A closely related problem, expressed shortly after 9/11 by Dr. Jonathan Barnett, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is that “[f]ire and the structural damage . . . would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated” (Glanz, 2001). But the NIST report, in its section headed “Learning from the Recovered Steel,” fails even to mention either evaporation or sulfidation.[55] Why would the NIST scientists apparently share Mayor Bloomberg’s disdain for empirical studies of recovered steel?
North Tower Antenna Drop: Another problem noted by FEMA is that videos show that, in the words of the FEMA Report, “the transmission tower on top of the [north tower] began to move downward and laterally slightly before movement was evident at the exterior wall. This suggests that collapse began with one or more failures in the central core area of the building” (FEMA 2002, ch. 2).[56] This drop was also mentioned in a New York Times story by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, which said: “Videos of the north tower's collapse appear to show that its television antenna began to drop a fraction of a second before the rest of the building. The observations suggest that the building's steel core somehow gave way first” (Glanz and Lipton, 2002). In the supposedly definitive NIST Report, however, we find no mention of this fact. This is another convenient omission, since the most plausible, and perhaps only possible, explanation would be that the core columns were cut by explosives---an explanation that would fit with the testimony of several witnesses.
South Tower Tipping and Disintegration: If the north tower’s antenna drop was anomalous (from the perspective of the official theory), the south tower’s collapse contained an even stranger anomaly. The uppermost floors---above the level struck by the airplane---began tipping toward the corner most damaged by the impact. According to conservation-of-momentum laws, this block of approximately 34 floors should have fallen to the ground far outside the building’s footprint. “However,” observe Paul and Hoffman, “as the top then began to fall, the rotation decelerated. Then it reversed direction [even though the] law of conservation of angular momentum states that a solid object in rotation will continue to rotate at the same speed unless acted on by a torque” (Paul and Hoffman, 2004, p. 34).
And then, in the words of Steven Jones, a physics professor at BYU, “this block turned mostly to powder in mid-air!” This disintegration stopped the tipping and allowed the uppermost floors to fall straight down into, or at least close to, the building’s footprint. As Jones notes, this extremely strange behavior was one of many things that NIST was able to ignore by virtue of the fact that its analysis, in its own words, “does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached” (NIST 2005, p. 80, n. 12). This is convenient because it means that NIST did not have to answer Jones’s question: “How can we understand this strange behavior, without explosives?” (Jones, 2006).
This behavior is, however, not strange to experts in controlled demolition. Mark Loizeaux, the head of Controlled Demolition, Inc., has said:
[b]y differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance . . . . We'll have structures start facing north and end up going to the north-west. (Else, 2004) [/b]
Once again, something that is inexplicable in terms of the official theory becomes a matter of course if the theory of controlled demolition is adopted.
WTC Security: The suggestion that explosives might have been used raises the question of how anyone wanting to place explosives in the towers could have gotten through the security checks. This question brings us to a possibly relevant fact about a company---now called Stratesec but then called Securacom---that was in charge of security for the World Trade Center. From 1993 to 2000, during which Securacom installed a new security system, Marvin Bush, the president’s brother, was one of the company’s directors. And from 1999 until January of 2002, their cousin Wirt Walker III was the CEO (Burns, 2003).[57] One would think these facts should have made the evening news---or at least The 9/11 Commission Report.
These facts, in any case, may be relevant to some reports given by people who had worked in the World Trade Center. Some of them reportedly said that although in the weeks before 9/11 there had been a security alert that mandated the use of bomb-sniffing dogs, that alert was lifted five days before 9/11 (Taylor and Gardiner, 2001).
[b]
Also, a man named Scott Forbes, who worked for Fiduciary Trust---the company for which Kristen Breitweiser’s husband worked---has written:
On the weekend of [September 8-9, 2001], there was a “power down” condition in . . . the south tower. This power down condition meant there was no electrical supply for approximately 36 hours from floor 50 up. . . . The reason given by the WTC for the power down was that cabling in the tower was being upgraded . . . . Of course without power there were no security cameras, no security locks on doors [while] many, many “engineers” [were] coming in and out of the tower.[58]
Also, a man named Ben Fountain, who was a financial analyst with Fireman’s Fund in the south tower, was quoted in [i]People Magazine as saying that during the weeks before 9/11, the towers were evacuated “a number of times” (People Magazine, 2001). [/i][/b]
Foreknowledge of the Collapse: One more possibly relevant fact is that then Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talking on ABC News about his temporary emergency command center at 75 Barkley Street, said:
We were operating out of there when we were told that the World Trade Center was gonna collapse, and it did collapse before we could get out of the building.[59]
This is an amazing statement. Prior to 9/11, fire had never brought down a steel-frame high-rise. The firemen who reached the 78th floor of the south tower certainly did not believe it was going to collapse. Even the 9/11 Commission reported that to its knowledge, “none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible” (Kean and Hamilton, 2004, p. 302). So why would anyone have told Giuliani that at least one of the towers was about to collapse?
The most reasonable answer, especially in light of the new evidence, is that someone knew that explosives had been set in the south tower and were about to be discharged. It is even possible that the explosives were going to be discharged earlier than originally planned because the fires in the south tower were dying down more quickly than expected, because so much of the plane’s jet fuel had burned up in the fireball outside the building.[60] This could explain why although the south tower was struck second, suffered less structural damage, and had smaller fires, it collapsed first---after only 56 minutes. That is, if the official story was going to be that the fire caused the collapse, the building had to be brought down before the fire went completely out.[61]
We now learn from the oral histories, moreover, that Giuliani is not the only one who was told that a collapse was coming. At least four of the testimonies indicate that shortly before the collapse of the south tower, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had predicted the collapse of at least one tower.[62] The director of OEM reported directly to Giuliani.[63] So although Giuliani said that he and others “were told” that the towers were going to collapse, it was his own people who were doing the telling.
As New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer has pointed out, the 9/11 Commission had access to the oral histories.[64] It should have discussed these facts, but it did not.
The neglect of most of the relevant facts about the collapses, manifested by The 9/11 Commission Report, was continued by the NIST Report, which said, amazingly:
The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the "probable collapse sequence," although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached. . . . [Our simulation treats only] the structural deterioration of each tower from the time of aircraft impact to the time at which the building . . . was poised for collapse (80n, 140).
Steven Jones comments, appropriately:
What about the subsequent complete, rapid and symmetrical collapse of the buildings? . . . What about the antenna dropping first in the North Tower? What about the molten metal observed in the basement areas . . . ? Never mind all that: NIST did not discuss at all any data after the buildings were “poised for collapse.” Well, some of us want to look at all the data, without computer simulations that are “adjusted” to make them fit the desired outcome. (Jones, 2006)
Summary: When we add these five additional suspicious facts to the eleven features that that the collapses of the Twin Towers had in common with controlled demolitions, we have a total of sixteen facts about the collapses of these buildings that, while being inexplicable in terms of the official theory, are fully understandable on the theory that the destruction of the towers was an inside job.
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“INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM DOES NOT EXIST”:
SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WERE THE RESULT OF A SET UP
General Leonid Ivashov
January 23, 2006
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...iewArticle&code=IVA20060123&articleId=1789
Originally published by http://www.voltairenet.org/article133909.html
see also http://www.axisforpeace.net
General Leonid Ivashov was the Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces when the September 11, 2001, attacks took place. This military man, who lived the events from the inside, offers an analysis which is very different to that of his American colleagues. As he did during the Axis for Peace 2005 conference, he now explains that international terrorism does not exist and that the September 11 attacks were the result of a set-up. What we are seeing is a manipulation by the big powers; this terrorism would not exist without them. He affirms that, instead of faking a “world war on terror”, the best way to reduce that kind of attacks is through respect for international law and peaceful cooperation among countries and their citizens.
As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads.
It is globalization that creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished...
The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its “godfather”. The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity.
Today’s international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people’s intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries’ policies and the behavior of people.
Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality.
In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions:
1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.
2. Only secret services and their current chiefs – or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations – have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist – let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex.
3. Osama bin Laden and “Al Qaeda” cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation. The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet’s natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance.
The use of the term “international terrorism” has the following goals:
Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control;
Turning the people’s demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;
Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation;
Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services;
Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition;
Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext.
In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps:
To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect;
To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists;
to design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars);
To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century. To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity’s development, security and mutual support.
General Leonid Ivashov General Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union’s ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation’s Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.
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THE ANGLO-AMERICAN EMPIRE’s 9/11 ATROCITY: CRIMINALITY’s ZENITH
Larry Chin
September 11, 2006 Online Journal
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHI20060911&articleId=3205
Five years ago, on September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush administration and its allies and functionaries carried out the spectacular mass murder of 3,000 US citizens, establishing the pretext to unleash an unprecedented worldwide rampage of criminality, and a permanent war of conquest (the manufactured “war on terrorism”) that continues to escalate.
Five years later, the planners, operatives and beneficiaries of the 9/11 murders, led by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, remain unpunished, their hubris undimmed, as they plan new campaigns of destruction, in the name of the original criminal act that they themselves carried out.
Five years later, in the wake of its 9/11 atrocity, the Bush administration has transformed the world into a literal hell.
Criminals occupy the top positions of power. The annihilation and conquest of nations, the cleansing of entire populations, and torture, are official policy. Criminal covert operations explode on a daily basis throughout the world, carried out (and blamed on) by “terrorists” created, guided and controlled by intelligence apparatuses (CIA, Pakistan ISI, “Al-Qaeda," Osama, etc.) beholden to no authority. Corruption poisons the fabric of modern society. The Constitution, a memory. Laws are broken. Or they are simply gutted and rewritten by the criminals themselves (giving them eternal power). Elections, routinely manipulated to begin with, are openly seized by force. America is a police state. Central Asia and the Middle East, in flames. The public is controlled with propaganda, distortion, and cover-up (while purveyors of truth, whistleblowers and investigative journalists are targeted for intimidation and assassination. All this, courtesy of Bush’s 9/11.
This reign of terror is criminality’s triumph.
Bush-Cheney: guilty beyond any reasonable doubt
The editors of this publication, and its many associates around the world, sounded the alarm that a George W. Bush presidency would usher in an unprecedented era of tyranny, criminality, and death. We were right.
In the eyes of anyone with even a modest grasp of deep political realities, 9/11 was the grotesque and obvious (sloppy) work of the Bush administration; not an “intelligence failure” but an intelligence success, made even more successful thanks to the ignorance of a fearful, poorly educated and easily manipulated American populace. The facts have more than amply proven it.
Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s ‘War on Terrorism’ and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire At The End of The Age Of Oil exhaustively detail why 9/11 happened, how the Bush administration carried it out, who has benefited, and what has happened to the world since. Let a true commemoration of 9/11 begin and end with these two definite prosecutions, along with the material contained at their related web sites (Center for Research on Globalization and From The Wilderness). Until and unless the accused criminal forces succeed in shutting down these resources, the proof is there for all to see.
The facts lead directly to the offices of the Bush administration, not “outside enemies” or “al-Qaeda." The facts expose the entire “war on terrorism” as a lie. The tidal wave of 9/11 propaganda and deception cannot wash them away.
To accept any aspect of the US government’s account of 9/11, whether it is the brutal deceptions of the Bush administration (and the equally complicit neoliberal faction of the US elite), the limited hangout and cover-up of the 9/11 commission, or any of the incoherent “anti-conspiracy” ramblings of Left progressive “intellectuals," is to condone murder, and the absolute rule of criminals.
Tipping point
Today, as the contemptible and insane George W. Bush spews more Orwellian lies, as the lieutenants and enforcers of his “godfather” administration shamelessly evoke 9/11 -- dancing once again on the graves of thousands -- the perpetrators of the original atrocity are hard at work planning more.
Dick Cheney recently declared, as if describing himself: “The enemy that struck on 9/11 is fractured and weakened, yet still lethal, still determined to hit us again.” Cheney would very much like to hit America with a “new 9/11," a new false flag atrocity, as the Bush administration sets up the pretext for a multi-front war across the Middle East and the rest of the Eurasian continent, and another attempt at Hugo Chavez and Venezuela (by the end of the year).
In the Pentagon’s own words, “another 9/11 attack could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against some known targets." Five years have gone by since the manufactured crisis of 9/11. Now, the Anglo-American empire needs a “new 9/11” or a perceived threat capable of deceiving the public into supporting the next planned geostrategic horror.
As this writer previously warned, this is a moment of elite criminal consensus, and unprecedented danger:
“The Bush administration wants to attack Iran and Syria by October. Israel is going into Lebanon, but cannot expand beyond southern Lebanon, cannot attack Syria and Iran, without Anglo-American help. A US election (or “selection”) in November, likely to hand some degree of political power back to neoliberal (Democrats), gives the Bush-Cheney neocons a three-month window to attempt their super-violent end run.”
Today, as it was in the days leading up to 9/11/01, all eyes should be on the only criminals with the means, motive and opportunity. All eyes should be on the Bush administration.
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9/11 IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE:
FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS
Dr. Peter Dale Scott
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...iewArticle&code=SCO20050729&articleId=759
The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of Iraq.
The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies. Americans were eager to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”[1]
To this end, time after time, U.S. covert operations in the region have used so-called “Arab Afghan” warriors as assets, the jihadis whom we loosely link with the name and leadership of al Qaeda.[2] In country after country these “Arab Afghans” have been involved in trafficking Afghan heroin.
America’s sponsorship of drug-trafficking Muslim warriors, including those now in Al Qaeda, dates back to the Afghan War of 1979-89, sponsored in part by the CIA’s links to the drug-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).[3] It was part of CIA Director Casey’s strategy for launching covert operations over and above those approved and financed by a Democratic-controlled Congress.
The most conspicuous example of this alliance with drug-traffickers in the 1980s was the Contra support operation. Here again foreign money and drug profits filled the gap after Congress denied funds through the so-called Boland amendments; in this case government funds were used to lie about the Contras to the American people.[4] This was followed by a massive cover-up, in which a dubious role was played by then-Congressman Lee Hamilton, later of the 9/11 Commission.[5]
The lying continues. The 9/11 Commission Report assures Americans that “Bin Ladin and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States.”[6] This misleading statement fails to consider that:
1) Al Qaeda elements received considerable indirect U.S. Government assistance, first in Afghanistan until 1992, and thereafter in other countries such as Azerbaijan (1992-95). Before 1992, for example, the Afghan leader Jallaladin Haqqani organized and hosted the Arab Afghan volunteers known later as al Qaeda; and Haqqani “received bags of money each month from the [CIA] station in Islamabad.”[7] The Arab Afghans were also trained in urban terrorism, including car bombings, by Pakistani ISI operatives who were in turn trained by the CIA.[8]
2) Key members of the network which became al Qaeda, such as Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, Ali Mohamed, Mohamed Jamal Khalifa, and lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, were granted visas to enter the United States, despite being suspected of terrorism.[9] Al Qaeda foot soldiers were also admitted to the United States for training under a special visa program.[10]
3) At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an al Qaeda operative was given a list of Muslim candidates for al Qaeda’s jihad.[11]
4) When al Qaeda personnel were trained in the United States by a key al Qaeda operative, Sergeant Ali Mohamed of the U.S. Army Special Forces, Mohamed was still on the U.S. Army payroll.[12]
5) Repeatedly al Qaeda terrorists were protected by FBI officials from investigation and prosecution.[13]
In part America’s limited covert assistance to al Qaeda after 1989 was in order not to offend al Qaeda’s two primary supporters which America needed as allies: the intelligence networks of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But unquestionably the entry of United States oil companies into oil-rich Azerbaijan was achieved with the assistance of a U.S.-organized covert program using “Arab Afghan” operatives associated with bin Laden. Oil was the driving force of U.S. involvement in Central and South Asia, and oil led to U.S. coexistence with both al Qaeda and the world-dominating Afghan heroin trade.
This brings us to another extraordinary distortion in the 9/11 Report:
While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.[14]
That drug-trafficking does support al Qaeda-connected operations has been energetically asserted by the governments of Great Britain and many other European countries, as well as the head of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism. Heroin-trafficking has been a source of income in particular for al Qaeda-related warriors in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and Kosovo. Most recently it has supported terrorist attacks in the Netherlands and Spain.
U.S. support for al Qaeda elements, particularly in Azerbaijan and Kosovo, has increased dramatically the flow of heroin to Western Europe and the United States.
The Example of Azerbaijan
In the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, Arab Afghans clearly assisted this effort of U.S. oil companies to penetrate the region. In 1991-92, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos and Iran-Contra, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.[15] MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.
As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed “brown bags filled with cash” to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of Mujahideen mercenaries in Afghanistan.[16] (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Baku before the Mujahideen arrived.) Meanwhile, Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was “observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.”[17] At this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North America.[18] It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline (so much like Air America) did not become involved.[19]
The triple pattern of drugs, oil, and al Qaeda was seen again in Kosovo in 1998, where the Al-Qaeda-backed Islamist jihadis of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) received overt American assistance from the U.S. Government.[20] Though unmentioned in mainstream books on the war, both the al Qaeda and drug backgrounds of the KLA are recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them.[21]
Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local enmities, oil and drugs were prominent in the outcome. At the time critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.[22] BBC News announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new U.S. Army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.[23] Meanwhile by 2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now distributed by Kosovar Albanians.[24]
Sergeant Ali Mohamed and U.S. Intelligence Links to the Al Qaeda Leadership
The Report describes Ali Mohamed as “a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and become an instructor at Fort Bragg,” as well as helping to plan the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya (68). In fact Ali Mohamed was an important al Qaeda agent who, as the 9/11 Commission was told, "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership," including "persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."[25] But the person telling the 9/11 Commission this, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, misrepresented Ali Mohamed’s FBI relationship. He told the Commission that, "From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, [Mohamed] lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator and working as a security guard for a defense contractor."[26]
Ali Mohamed was not just an FBI job applicant. Unquestionably he was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.[27] And almost certainly he was something more. A veteran of the CIA-trained bodyguards of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was able, despite being on a State Department Watch List, to come to America around 1984, on what an FBI consultant has called “a visa program controlled by the CIA”, and obtain a job, first as a security officer, then with U.S. Special Forces.[28] In 1988 he took a lengthy leave of absence from the U.S. Army and went to fight in Afghanistan, where he met with Ayman al-Zawahiri (later bin Laden’s chief deputy in al Qaeda) and the “Arab Afghan” leadership.[29] Despite this, he was able to receive an Honorable Discharge one year later, at which point he established close contact with bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Ali Mohamed clearly enjoyed U.S. protection: in 1993, when detained by the RCMP in Canada, a single phone call to the U.S. secured his release. This enabled him to play a role, in the same year, in planning the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998.[30]
Congress should determine the true relationship of the U.S. Government to Ali Mohamed, who was close to bin Laden and above all Zawahiri, who has been called the “main player” in 9/11.[31] (Al-Zawahiri is often described as the more sophisticated mentor of the younger bin Laden.)[32] In particular Congress should determine why Patrick Fitzgerald chose to mislead the American people about Mohamed’s FBI status.
In short, the al Qaeda terror network accused of the 9/11 attacks was supported and expanded by U.S. intelligence programs and covert operations, both during and after the Soviet Afghan War. Congress should rethink their decision to grant still greater powers and budget to the agencies responsible for fostering this enemy in the first place.
Sane voices clamor from the Muslim world that the best answer to terrorism is not war but justice. We should listen to them. By using its energies to reduce the injustices tormenting Islam, the United States will do more to diminish terrorism than by creating any number of new directorates in Washington.
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Notes
[1] Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 115. Exploration in the 1990s has considerably downgraded these estimates.
[2] Western governments and media apply the term “al Qaeda” to the whole “network of co-opted groups” who have at some point accepted leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam [London: I.B. Tauris, 2004], 7-8). From a Muslim perceptive, the term “Al Qaeda” is clumsy, and has led to the targeting of a number of Islamist groups opposed to bin Laden’s tactics. See Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin L?den’s Right-Hand Man [London: Pluto Press, 2004], 100, etc.).
[3] Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 132; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 42.
[4] Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 213-28, 235-39, 245-47.
[5] For Hamilton’s role on the conspiratorial whitewashing of contra drug activities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 179-81. At least eight men in the current Bush Administration were criticized for their roles in Iran-Contra, including two (Poindexter and Abrams)who were convicted.
[6] 9/11 Commission Report, 56.
[7] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 157 (hosted); George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 521 (bags).
[8] George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 335 (car bombings); Steve Coll, Washington Post, 7/19/92 (ISI/CIA).
[9] Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan” (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67; cf. 218 (Khalifa). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Mohamed “settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA” ((Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allegedly admitted despite being on the State Department watch list include Mohammed Atta and possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 205, 46).
[10] Former State Department officer Michael Springmann, BBC 2, 11/6/01; Ahmed, War on Truth, 10.
[11] US v.. Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman et al, Federal Court, SDNY, Testimony of Rodney Hampton-El, 8/3/95.
[12] Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding about the War on Terror [New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins, 2004], 25); Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98, http://billstclair.com/911timeline/1990s...10198.html: "Mr. Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the U.S. government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green Beret, part of America's Special Forces…. A confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was 'partly culpable' for the World Trade Centre bomb, according to reports at the time." Williams writes that Mohamed’s “primary task as a U.S. soldier was to train Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan” (Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror. 117). Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68.
[13] The most prominent example was the blocking by David Frasca at FBI HQ of the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Frasca also failed to act on the July 2001 request from the Phoenix FBI office urging a systematic review of Muslim students at U.S. flight schools (Ahmed, War on Truth, 251-57).
[14] 9/11 Commission Report, 171. This statement is one-sided and misleading. But so is the opposite claim of Yossef Bodansky: “The annual income of the Taliban from the drug trade is estimated at $8 billion. Bin Laden administers and manages these funds – laundering them through the Russian mafia…” (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 315).
[15] Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. A fourth operative in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North’s Contra support effort. For more on General Secord’s and Major Aderholt’s role as part of Ted Shackley’s team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.
[16] Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord advise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whether the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.
[17] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7. These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post article did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore "big cowboy hats and big cowboy boots" had arrived in Azerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan's radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, 4/21/94). The Azeri “Afghan Brigade” was formally dissolved in 1994, after which it focused more on sabotage and terrorism (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 181).
[18] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176.
[19] As the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unholy Wars, 176).
[20] See Lewis Mackenzie (former UN commander in Bosnia), “We Bombed the Wrong Side?” National Post, 4/6/04: “Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers. The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored….The Kosovar Albanians played us like a Stradivarius violin. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world." Cf. John Pilger, New Statesman, 12/13/04.
[21] “`Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan,’ said James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia and an expert on the Balkans. `Milosevic is right. There is no question of their participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented” (National Post, 3/15/02, http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/s...44843.html). Cf. Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organized Crime Program, in testimony presented to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee (12/13/00): "What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics.” Contrast e.g. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War : Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2000), 13: “the KLA, at first a small band of poorly trained and amateurish gunmen.” For the al Qaeda background to the UCK and its involvement in heroin-trafficking, see also Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda´s Balkan Links,” Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01. “According to Michel Koutouzis, the DEA's website once contained a section detailing Kosovar trafficking, but a week before the U.S.-led bombings began, the section disappeared” (Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/...eroin.html).
[22] George Monbiot, Guardian, 2/15/01.
[23] BBC News, 12/28/04. Those who charged that such a pipeline was projected were initially mocked but gradually vindicated (Guardian, 2/15/01; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 34). See also Marjorie Cohn, “Nato Bombing of Kosovo: Humanitarian Intervention or Crime against Humanity?” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2002, 79-106.
[24] Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000.
[25] Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68.
[26] Patrick Fitzgerald, Testimony before 9/11 Commission, June 16, 2004, http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing12.htm, emphasis added.
[27] Fitzgerald must have known he was dissembling. Even the mainstream account by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (The Age of Sacred Terror [New York: Random House, 2002], 236) records that “When Mohamed was summoned back from Africa in 1993 [sic, Mohamed in his confession says 1994] to be interviewed by the FBI in connection with the case against Sheikh Rahman and his coconspirators, he convinced the agents that he could be useful to them as an informant.” Cf. Lawrence Wright, New Yorker, 9/16/02: “In 1989…Mohamed talked to an F.B.I. agent in California and provided American intelligence with its first inside look at Al Qaeda.” Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using Mohamed as an informant, when it should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist plotting against the United States. In Johnson's words, "It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control” (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/04/01).
[28] Lance, 1000 Years, 30 (Watch List); Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror, 117 (visa program); Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 128 (security officer).
[29] Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (New York: Random House/Prima, 2001), 106; cf. Richard H. Shultz, Jr. and Ruth Margolies Beitler, Middle East Review of International Affairs, June 2004, http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2004/issue2/jv8n2a6.html. In 1995 Mohamed accompanied Ayman al-Zawahiri of Islamic Jihad, already effectively merged with al-Qaeda, on a secret fund-raising trip through America (Bodansky, Bin Laden, 105; Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc. [New York: Free Press, 2001], 201).
[30] Cf. 9/11 Commission Report, 68. The Globe and Mail later concluded that Mohamed "was working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993” (Globe and Mail, 11/22/01, http://www.mail-archive.com/hydro@topica...00224.html).
[31] al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda, 98: “I am convinced that [Zawahiri] and not bin Laden is the main player in these events.” In contrast the 9/11 Commission Report (151) assigns no role to Zawahiri in the 9/11 plot. Was Mohamed in touch with Zawahiri at this time? The San Francisco Chronicle has written that “until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was already under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries” (San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21/01).
[b][32] Burke, Al-Qaeda, 150.
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4
9/11: POSSIBLE MOTIVES OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
Dr. David Ray Griffin
December 2, 2005 911Truth.org
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...iewArticle&code=GRI20051202&articleId=1391
The 9/11 Commission understood that its mandate, as we have seen, was to provide "the fullest possible account" of the "facts and circumstances" surrounding 9/11. Included in those facts and circumstances are ones that, according to some critics of the official account of 9/11, provide evidence that the Bush administration intentionally allowed the attacks of 9/11. Some critics have even suggested that the Bush administration actively helped the attacks succeed. In light of the fact that several books have been written propounding such views, including some in English, the Commission's staff, given its "exacting investigative work," would surely have discovered such books. Or if not, the staff would at least have known about a front-page story on this topic in the Wall Street Journal. Readers of this story learned not only that a poll showed that 20 percent of the German population believed the "U.S. government ordered the attacks itself" but also that similar views were held in some other European countries.1 Also, as we saw in the Introduction, polls show that significant percentages of Americans and Canadians believe that the US Government deliberately allowed the attacks to happen, with some of those believing the Bush administration actually planned the attacks. Knowing that such information is available and such views are held, the Commission, we would assume, would have felt called upon to respond to these suspicions.
An adequate response would contain at least the following elements: (1) an acknowledgment that these suspicions exist; (2) a summary of the main kinds of reports and alleged facts cited as evidence by those who have promoted these suspicions; and (3) an explanation of why these reports and alleged facts do not really constitute evidence for complicity by the Bush administration.
Finally, the persistence and widespread documentation of these allegations means that an adequate response would need to consider (if only to debunk) the motives that some critics have alleged the Bush administration would have had for facilitating the 9/11 attacks ? just as the Commission properly looked at motives that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organizations may have had for planning the attacks. For many Americans, of course even considering the possibility that their own government might have had motives for facilitating such attacks would not be pleasant. But an account, if it is to be the fullest possible account, cannot decide in advance to restrict itself to the ideas that are pleasant.
In this chapter, accordingly, we will look at The 9/11 Commission Report from this perspective, asking how it has responded to the fact that some critics of the official account have alleged that the Bush administration would have had several motives for allowing the attacks and even helping them succeed.
The 9/11 Attacks As "Opportunities"
One way to approach this question would be to ask whether these attacks brought benefits to this administration that could reasonably have been anticipated.
There is no doubt that the attacks brought benefits. Indeed, several members of the Bush administration publicly said so. The president himself declared that the attacks provide "a great opportunity."2 Donald Rumsfeld stated that 9/11 created "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world." Condoleeza Rice had said the same thing in mind, telling senior members of the National Security Council to "think about 'how do you capitalize on these opportunities' to fundamentally change...the shape of the world."3 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the Bush administration in September 2002, said: "The events of September 11, 2001, opened vast, new opportunities."4
Of course, the fact that these members of the Bush administration described attacks as opportunities after the fact does not necessarily mean that they could have anticipated in advance that attacks of this nature would bring such opportunities. However, all of these statements, except for the last one, were made shortly after 9/11. If the benefits could be seen so soon after the attacks, we can assume that, if these people were thinking about such attacks ahead of time, they could have anticipated that they would create these opportunities.
It would seem, therefore, that the Bush administration's description of the attacks as providing opportunities, along with the fact that at least some of these opportunities could have been anticipated, were important parts of the "events surrounding 9/11" that "the fullest possible account" would have included. These descriptions of the attacks of 9/11 as opportunities, however, are not mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report.5
In any case, the idea that members of the Bush administration could have anticipated benefits from catastrophic attacks of the type that occurred on 9/11 does not rest entirely on inference from the fact that the attacks were seen as opportunities immediately after 9/11. Critics have referred to a pre-9/11 document that speaks of benefits that could accrue from catastrophic attacks. We need to see how the Commission responded to this part of the facts and circumstances surrounding 9/11.
"A New Pearl Harbor" To Advance The Pax Americana
In the fall of 2000, a year before 9/11, a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses was published by an organization calling itself the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).6 This organization was formed by individuals who were members or at least supporters of the Reagan and Bush I administration, some of whom would go on to be central figures in the Bush II administration. These individuals include Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad (closely associated with Paul Wolfowitz7), Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and James Woolsey. Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff) and Wolfowitz (now Rumsfeld's deputy) are listed as having participated directly in the project to produce Rebuilding America's Defenses. Interestingly, John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, has been a member of the PNAC or at least publicly aligned with it.8
This PNAC document, after bemoaning the fact that spending for military purposes no longer captured as much of the US budget as it once did, argues that it is necessary for defense spending to be greatly increased if the "American peace is to be maintained, and expanded," because this Pax Americana "must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence." The way to acquire and retain such military preeminence is to take full advantage of the "revolution in military affairs" made possible by technological advances. Bring about this transformation of US military forces will, however, probably be a long, slow process, partly because it will be very expensive. However, the document suggests, the process could occur more quickly if America suffered "some catastrophic and catalyzing event ? like a new Pearl Harbor."9 This statement, we would think, should have gotten the attention of some members of the 9/11 Commission.
After the 9/11 attacks came, moreover, the idea that they constituted a new Pearl Harbor was expressed by the president and some of his supporters. At the end of that very day, President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today."10 Also, minutes after the president's address to the nation earlier that day. Henry Kissinger posted an online article in which he said: "The government should be charged with a systematic response that, one hopes, will end the way the attack on Pearl Harbor ended ? with the destruction of the system that is responsible for it."11
One might think that the existence of these statements would have been perceived by the 9/11 Commission as part of the relevant "events surrounding 9/11" that should be included in "the fullest possible account." But there is no mention of any of these statements on any of the 567 pages of the Kean-Zelikow Report.
Those pages are largely filled ? in line with the Commission's unquestioned assumption ? with discussions of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, Islamic terrorism more generally, and American responses thereto. Then, after the Commission had disbanded, its staff released another 155-page report on al-Qaeda financing.12 These matters were obviously considered essential for understand-ing the "facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."
But the fact that individuals who are central members and supporters of the Bush-Cheney administration endorsed a document indicating that "a new Pearl Harbor" would be helpful for furthering its aims; that some supporters of this administration and even the president himself then compared the 9/11 attacks to the Pearl Harbor attacks; and that several members of this administration said that 9/11 provided "opportunities" ? this complex fact was not thought worthy of a single sentence in the Commission's "fullest possible account." Indeed, the Commission's report does not even mention the Project for the New American Century.
Generating Funds For The US Space Command
One dimension of the "revolution in military affairs" discussed in the PNAC document is so important as to deserve separate treatment. This dimension is the militarization of space, which is now the province of a new branch of the American military, the US Space Command.
The purpose of this branch is to bring about "full spectrum dominance." The idea is that the US military, with its air force, army, and navy, is already dominant in the air and on land and sea. The US Space Command will now ensure dominance in space. "Vision for 2020," a document published by the US Space Command, puts it thus: "The emerging synergy of space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority, will lead to Full Spectrum Dominance."13
The government's description of spending for the US Space Command as spending for "missile defense" makes its mission sound purely defensive ? augmenting "homeland security" by defending the United States from missile attacks. The mission statement in "Vision for 2020," however, states: "U.S. Space Command ? dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment."14 Its primary purpose, in other words, is not to protect the American homeland but to protect American investments abroad. Such protection will be needed, it says, because "[t]he globalization of the world economy will continue with a widening between 'haves' and 'have-nots.'" The mission of the US Space Command, it is clear, is to protect the American "haves" from the world's "have-nots," as American-led globalization leaves these "have-nots" with even less.
The 9/11 Commission, however, makes no mention of the US Space Command's program and mission. To understand the full significance of this omission, it is necessary to understand that its program involves three parts. The first part involves space-based surveillance technology, through which US military leaders can identify enemies of US forces anywhere on the planet.15
The second part involves putting up space weapons, such as laser cannons, with which the United States will be able to destroy the satellites of other countries. "Vision for 2020" frankly states its desire to be able "to deny others the use of space."16
The third part of the program is usually called, the "missile defense shield," but its purpose, like that of the first two parts, is offensive.
As Rebuilding America's Defenses said (in a passage called "a remarkable admission" by Rahul Mahajan):
In the post-Cold-War era. America and its allies...have become the primary objects of deterrence and it is states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea who most wish to develop deterrent capabilities. Projecting conventional military forces... will be far more complex and constrained when the American homeland...is subject to attack by otherwise weak rogue regimes capable of cobbling together a minuscule ballistic missile force. Building an effective...system of missile defenses is a prerequisite for maintaining American preeminence.17
The purpose of the "missile defense shield," in other words, is not to deter other countries from launching a first strike against the United States. Its purpose is to prevent other countries from being able to deter the United States from launching a first strike against them.18
The major impediment to making this program operational is that it will be extremely expensive. According to one expert, it will require over $1 trillion from American taxpayers.19 The difficulty of getting Congress and the American people to pony up was the main reason for the PNAC document's statement that the desired transformation will take a long time "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event ? like a New Pearl Harbor."20
In omitting any mention of this project for achieving global domination, therefore, the 9/11 Commission omitted a project so big that some of its backers, we can imagine, may have been able to rationalize an attack taking a few thousand American lives, if such an attack seemed necessary to get adequate funding for this project.
Donald Rumsfeld, as we saw, was a member of PNAC when it produced its document. He was also chairman of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization.21 The task of this commission ? commonly known as the "Rumsfeld Commission" ? was to make proposals with regard to the US Space Command. After making various proposals that would "increase the asymmetry between U.S. forces and those of other military powers," the Rumsfeld Commission Report said that, because its proposals would cost a lot of money and involve significant reorganization, they would probably encounter strong resistance. But, the report ? which was issued January 7, 2001 ? said:
The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people ? a "Space Pearl Harbor" ? will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.22
In speaking of a "Space Pearl Harbor," the report meant an attack on its military satellites in space. The 9/11 attacks were obviously not of this nature. It is interesting, nevertheless, that only a few months after PNAC had issued its statement about "a new Pearl Harbor," the Rumsfeld Commission also pointed out that a Pearl Harbor type of attack might be needed to "galvanize the nation."
When the new Pearl Harbor came, Rumsfeld, having been made secretary of defense, was in position to use it to get more money for the US Space Command. Before TV cameras on the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld said to Senator Carl Levin, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don't have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense...Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending, to dip into Social Security, if necessary, to pay for defense spending ? increase defense spending?23
Earlier that day, the Pentagon, which by then had been under Rumsfeld's leadership for almost seven months, failed to prevent airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon itself. Now that very evening Rumsfeld was using the success of those attacks to get more money from Congress for the Pentagon and, in particular, for the US Space Command. One might think that this rather remarkable coincidence would have gotten the attention of the 9/11 Commission, because it suggests that the secretary of defense may not have wanted to prevent this "new Pearl Harbor." But the Commission's report, focusing exclusively on al-Qaeda terrorists, makes no mention of this possible motive.
Rumsfeld was, moreover, not the only person highly committed to promoting the US Space Command who was in charge of military affairs on 9/11. Another was General Ralph E. Eberhart, the current head of the US Space Command, who is also the commander of NORAD.24 General Richard Myers, the former head of the US Space Command, was on 9/11 the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff.
A truly "independent" and "impartial" commission would surely comment on this remarkable coincidence ? that three of the men in charge of the US military response on 9/11 were outspoken advocates of the US Space Command, that the US military under their control failed to prevent the attacks, and that one of these men then used the success of the attacks to obtain billions of dollars more for this branch of the military.
Coincidence does not, of course, prove complicity. Sometimes when events coincide in an improbable way, the coincidence is exactly what the term has generally come to mean; simply coincidental. It is well know, however, that after a crime the first question to be asked is cui bono? ? who benefits? A truly independent commission would at least have proceeded on the assumption that Rumsfeld, Myers, and Eberhart had to be regarded as possible suspects, whose actions that day were to be rigorously investigated. Instead, the testimonies of these three men were treated as unquestionable sources of truth as to what really happened ? despite, as we will see later, the contradictions in their stories.25
The Plan To Attack Afghanistan
Critics have alleged that another possible motive on the part of the Bush administration was its desire to attack Afghanistan so as to replace the Taliban with a US-friendly government in order to further US economic and geopolitical aims.
The 9/11 Commission does recognize that the US war in Afghanistan ? which began on October 7, less than a month after 9/11 ? was a war to produce "regime change". According to the Commission, however, the United States wanted to change the regime because the Taliban, besides being incapable of providing peace by ending the civil war, was perpetrating human rights abuses and providing a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda. In limiting the US motives to these, however, the Commission ignored abundant evidence that the motives were more complex, more self-interested, and more ambitious.
At the center of these motives was the desire to enable the building of a multibillion dollar pipeline route by a consortium known as CentGas (Central Asia Gas Pipeline), which was formed by US oil giant Unocal. The planned route would bring oil and gas from the land-locked Caspian region, with its enormous reserves, to the sea through Afghanistan and Pakistan. By 2001, the Taliban had come to be perceived as an obstacle to this project.
The Taliban was originally supported by the United States, working together with Pakistan's ISI. The pipeline project had become the crucial issue in what Ahmed Rashid in 1997 dubbed "The New Great Game."26 One issue in this game was who would construct the pipeline route ? the Unocal-dominated CentGas Consortium or Argentina's Bridas Corporation. The other issue was which countries the route would go through. The United States promoted Unocal and backed its plan to build the route through Afghanistan and Pakistan, since this route would avoid both Iran and Russia.27 The main obstacle to this plan was the civil war that had been going on in Afghanistan since the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989. The US government supported the Taliban in the late 1990s on the basis of hope that it would be able to unify the country through its military strength and then provide a stable government.
The centrality of this issue is shown by the title Rashid gave to two of his chapters: "Romancing the Taliban: The Battle for Pipelines."28 With regard to the United States in particular, Rashid says that "the strategy over pipelines had become the driving force behind Washington's interest in the Taliban."29 However, although the Kean-Zelikow Commission cites Rashid's well-known book several times, it makes no reference to his discussion of the centrality of the pipelines to Washington's perspective.
From reading the Commission's report, in fact, one would never suspect that "pipeline war" (as it became called) was a major US concern. The pipeline project in general and Unocal in particular are mentioned in only one paragraph (along with its accompanying note). And the Commission here suggests that the US State Department was interested in Unocal's pipeline project only insofar as "the prospect of shared pipeline profits might lure faction leaders to a conference table". The United States, in other words, regarded the pipeline project only as a means to peace. That may indeed have been the view of some of the American participants. But the dominant hope within Unocal and the US government was that the Taliban would bring peace by defeating its opponents, primarily Ahmad Shah Masood ? after which the US government and the United Nations would recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, which in turn would allow Unocal to get the loans it would need to finance the project.30
The Commission's report, by contrast, suggests that neither the US government nor Unocal took the side of the Taliban in the civil war. The Commission tells us that Marty Miller, who had been in charge of the pipeline project for Unocal, "denied working exclusively with the Taliban and told us that his company sought to work with all Afghan factions to bring about the necessary stability to proceed with the project". As is often the case, the Commission's "exacting investigative work" consisted primarily of interviewing people and recording their answers. Had the Commission consulted Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, which the Commission quotes elsewhere, it could have learned that although "Marty Miller insisted publicly that Unocal remained 'fanatically neutral' about Afghan politics, " in reality "Marty Miller and his colleagues hoped the Taliban takeover of Kabul would speed their pipeline negotiations."31 Coll is here referring to September 1996, when the Taliban, heavily financed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, took over Kabul, the capital, by forcing Masood to flee. As soon as this occurred, Rashid reports, a Unocal executive "told wire agencies that the pipeline project would be easier to implement now that the Taliban had capture Kabul."32 We are again left wondering if the Kean-Zelikow Commission's research was simply inadequate or if it deliberately left out information that did not fit its narrative.
There is a similar problem with the Commission's statement about US neutrality. The Commission says flatly: "U.S. diplomats did not favor the Taliban over the rival factions but were simply willing to 'give the Taliban a chance'". Interviews are again the only support offered. Had the Commission consulted Rashid's book on this issue, it would have read that the United States "accepted the ISI's analysis...that a Taliban victory in Afghanistan would make Unocal's job much easier."33 Rashid also reports that "within house of Kabul's capture by the Taliban" ? when much of the country still remained under the control of other factions ? "the US State Department announced it would establish diplomatic relations with the Taliban."34 The lack of US neutrality is likewise shown by Steve Coll, who says: "The State Department had taken up Unocal's agenda as its own" ? which meant, of course, support for the Taliban.35
Rashid, summarizing the situation, says that "the US-Unocal partnership was backing the Taliban and wanted an all-out Taliban victory ? even as the US and Unocal claimed they had no favourites in Afghanistan."36 The Kean-Zelikow Commission, by contrast, simply gives us public relations statements of some of the US and Unocal actors, repeated in recent interviews, as actual history.
Why is it important to point out this distortion? Because the Commission's portrayal of US interests in Afghanistan suggests that the United States had no imperialistic or crass material interests in the area ? the kind of interests that might lead a government to devise a pretext for going to war. This issue becomes more important as we move to the point in the story at which the United States comes to think of the Taliban as an obstacle rather than a vehicle of the Unocal (CEntGas) pipeline project.
In July 1998, the Taliban, after having failed in 1997 to take the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, finally succeeded, giving it control of most of Afghanistan, including the entire pipeline route. After this victory CentGas immediately announced that it was "ready to proceed."37 Shortly thereafter, however, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, leading the United States to launch cruse missile strikes against OBL's camps in Afghanistan. These and related developments led Unocal to withdraw from CentGas, convinced that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never have the peace and stability needed for the pipeline project.38 Rashid, finishing his book in mid-1999, wrote that the Clinton Administration had shifted its support to the pipeline route from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, adding that "by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban."39
When the Bush administration came to power, however, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. This last chance occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001, which would need to be mentioned in any realistic account of how the US war in Afghanistan came about. According to the Pakistani representative at this meeting, Niaz Naik, US representatives, trying to convince the Taliban to share power with US-friendly factions, said: "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs."40 Naik said that he was told by Americans that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead...before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest."41 The US attack on Afghanistan began, in fact, on October 7, which was as soon as the US military could get ready after 9/11.42
The 9/11 Commission's discussion of what transpired in July is much milder. Some members of the Bush administration, we are told, were "moving toward agreement that some last effort should be made to convince the Taliban to shift position and then, if that failed,...the United States would try covert action to topple the Taliban's leadership from within". There is no mention of Niaz Naik or the meeting in Berlin. The Commission's reference to the fact that the United States wanted the Taliban to "shift position" does not mention that this shift involved not simply turning over OBL but joining a "unity government" that would allow Unocal's pipeline project to go forward. Nor does the Commission mention the statement by US officials that if the Taliban refused, the United States would use military force (not merely covert action). And yet all this information was available in books and newspapers articles that the Commission's staff should have been able to locate.
In any case, there was still further evidence, ignored by the Commission, that the US war against the Taliban was related more to the pipeline project than to 9/11. For one thing, President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad (mentioned previously as a member of PNAC), and the new Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, were previously on Unocal's payroll. As Chalmers Johnson wrote: "The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains as interested in oil as in terrorism in that region."43 As early as October 10, moreover, the US Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that "in view of recent geopolitical developments," Unocal was again ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.44 Finally, as one Israeli writer put it: "If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean."45
There is considerable evidence, therefore, that, in Chalmer Johnson's words, "Support for [the dual oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan south through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan] appears to have been a major consideration in the Bush administration's decision to attack Afghanistan on October 7, 2001" ? a point that Johnson makes apart from any allegation that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.46 But the 9/11 Commission does not even mention the fact that many people share Johnson's view, according to which the US war in Afghanistan was motivated by a concern much larger than those mentioned by the Commission.
This larger concern, furthermore, "was not just to make money," suggests Johnson, "but to establish an American presence in Central Asia." Evidence for this view is provided by the fact that the United States, besides establishing long-term bases in Afghanistan, had within a month after 9/11 arranged for long-term bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.47 The United States could thereby be seen to be carrying out the prescription of Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he portrayed Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power. Brzezinksi, who had been the National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, argued that America, to ensure its continued "primacy," must get control of this region. The Bush administration's use of 9/11 to establish bases in several countries in this region provided an essential step in that direction. In The 9/11 Commission Report, however, there is no hint of this development. The United States simply wanted to stop the war, bring an end to the Taliban's human rights abuses, and prevent Afghanistan from being used as a haven for terrorists. In the world of the Kean-Zelikow Commission, the United States had no larger ambitions.
The omission of Brzezinksi's book means, furthermore, the omission of an earlier suggestion that a new Pearl Harbor could be helpful. Brzezinski, having argued that the present "window of historical opportunity for America's constructive exploitation of its global power could prove to be relatively brief,"48 bemoans the fact that the American public might be unwilling to use its power for imperial purposes. The problem according to Brzezinski's analysis, is that:
America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for military intimidation...The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualities even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.49
Brzezinski suggests, however, that this weakness in democracy can be overcome. Having said that "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion," he then adds: "except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well being."50
What would make the American public willing to make the economic and human sacrifices needed for "imperial mobilization," he suggests, would be "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." This passage, near the end of the book, is parallel to an earlier passage, in which Brzezinski said that the public was willing to support "America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."51 A new Pearl Harbor would, accordingly, allow America to ensure its continued primacy by gaining control of Central Asia.
In deciding which events belonged to the category of "events surrounding 9/11"a ? meaning events relevant to understanding why and how the attacks of 9/11 occurred ? the Commission chose to include OBL's 1998 statement that Muslims should kill Americans (47). That was considered obviously relevant. But the 9/11 Commission did not include Brzezinski's 1997 suggestion that a new Pearl Harbor would prod Americans to support the increased money for the military needed to support imperial mobilization ? even though the Commission points out that 9/11 had exactly the result that Brzezinski predicted saying:
The nation has committed enormous resources to national security and to countering terrorism. Between fiscal year 2001, the last budget adopted before 9/11, and the present fiscal year 2004, total federal spending on defense (including expenditures on both Iraq and Afghanistan), homeland security, and international affairs rose more than 50 percent, from $345 billion to about $547 billion. The United States has not experienced such a rapid surge in national security spending since the Korean War. (361)
But the Commissioners evidently thought it too much of a stretch to ask whether motive might be inferred from effect.
We see again how the Commission's unquestioned assumption ? that the 9/11 attacks were planned and executed entirely by al-Qaeda under the guidance of Osama bin Laden ? determined in advance its selection of which events constituted "events surrounding 9/11." In line with this assumption, the 9/11 Commission has given us an extremely simplistic picture of US motivations behind the attack on Afghanistan. The Commission has, in particular, omitted all those facts suggesting that 9/11 was more the pretext than the basis for the war in Afghanistan.
The Plan To Attack Iraq
The Bush administration's attack on Iraq in 2003 is probably the issue on which the 9/11 Commission has been regarded as the most critical, stating that it found no evidence of "collaborative operational relationship" between OBL and Saddam Hussein's Iraq and no evidence, in particular, "that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States" (66). This statement, released in a staff report about a month before the publication of the final report, created much discussion in the press. The quantity and the intensity of this discussion was increased by the fact that the president and especially the vice president reacted strongly, with the latter calling "outrageous" a front-page story in the New York Times headed "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie."52 The resulting commentary ranged from William Safire's column, in which he lashed out at the Commission's chairman and vice chairman for letting themselves be "jerked around by a manipulative staff," to a New York Times story headed "Political Uproar: 9/11 Panel Members Debate Qaeda-Iraq 'Tie,'" to Joe Conason's article entitled "9/11 Panel Becomes Cheney's Nightmare."53
This commentary gave the appearance that the 9/11 Commission, perhaps especially its staff, was truly independent, telling the truth no matter how embarrassing it might be to the White House. That, of course, was mere appearance. Nevertheless, given the fact that Bush and Cheney continued to insist on the existence of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the Commission did in this case report something contrary to the public position of the White House.
The Commission was furthermore, forthcoming about the extent to which certain members of the Bush administration pushed for attacking Iraq immediately after 9/11. It pointed out that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to find out as much as he could about Saddam Hussein's possible responsibility for 9/11. It also cited a report according to which, at the first session at Camp David after 9/11, Rumsfeld began by asking what should be done about Iraq (334-35). The Commission even portrayed Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, as arguing that Saddam should be attacked even if there were only a 10 percent chance that he was behind the 9/11 attacks (335-36).54 Finally, the Commission reported Richard Clarke's statement that the president told him the day after 9/11 to see if Saddam was linked to the attacks in any way (334). The Commission was, therefore, quite frank about the fact that some leaders of the Bush administration were ready from the outset to attack Iraq because of its possible connections to 9/11 or at least al-Qaeda-connections for which the Commission said that it could find no credible evidence.
The Commission has, nevertheless, omitted facts about the decision to attack Iraq that should have been included in a "fullest possible account." These facts are important because their omission means that readers of The 9/11 Commission Report are shielded from evidence about how deep and long-standing the desire to attack Iraq had been among some members of the Bush administration.
Some of these omitted facts support the claim that the plan to attack Iraq had, in Chalmers Johnson's words, "been in the works for at least a decade."55 In pushing it back that far, Johnson is referring to the fact that after the Gulf War of 1991, several individuals in the White House and the Pentagon believed that the United States should have gone to Baghdad and taken out Saddam Hussein, as they indicated "in reports written for then Secretary of Defense Cheney."56 In 1996, a document entitled "A Clean Break" was produced by a study group led by Richard Perle (who would the following year become a founding member of PNAC). Recommending that Israel adopt a policy of "preemption," Perle and his colleagues suggested that Israel begin "rolling back Syria," an effort that should "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." Advocating that Israel invade Lebanon and then Syria, this document included texts to be used for speeches justifying the action in a way that would win sympathy in America. Besides "drawing attention to [Syria's] weapons of mass destruction," Israel should say:
Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria's require cautious realism...It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors...and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.57
As James Bamford points out in A Pretext For War, these justifications were very similar to those that would be used in later years to justify America's attack on Iraq.58
The argument for this American attack on Iraq became more visible the following year, after PNAC was formed. In December 1997, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad published an article in the Weekly Standard ? which is edited by the chairman of PNAC, William Kristol ? entitled "Saddam Must Go."59 A month later, these three and fifteen other members of PNAC ? including Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, and Richard Perle ? sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to use military force to "remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power" and thereby "to protect our vital interests in the Gulf." In May 1997, they sent a letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott ? the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, respectively. Complaining that Clinton had not listened to them, these letter-writers said that the United States "should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf ? and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."60 Finally, Rebuilding America's Defenses, published by PNAC in September 2000, emphasized that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a threat to American interests in the region.61
When the Bush administration took office in 2001, Chalmers Johnson points out, "ten of the eighteen signers of the letters to Clinton and Republican congressional leaders became members of the administration."62 It was no mere coincidence, therefore, that ? as both Paul O'Neil and Richard Clarke have emphasized ? the Bush administration was already intent on removing Saddam Hussein when it took office.63 And it is also not surprising to learn that immediately after the 9/11 attacks, some members of the Bush administration wanted to use those attacks as the basis for their long-desired invasion to bring about regime change in Iraq.
But the Kean-Zelikow Commission, having left out that background, provides no context for readers to understand why and how strongly some members of the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq. Indeed, the Commission fails to make clear just how ready some of them were to go to war against Iraq even if there was no evidence of its complicity in the attacks. A crucial omission in this respect is the failure to quote notes of Rumsfeld's conversations on 9/11 that were jotted down by an aide. These notes, which were later revealed by CBS News, indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweet it all up. Things related and not."64 James Bamford, after quoting these notes, says: "From the notes it was clear that the attacks would be used as a pretext for war against Saddam Hussein."65
The Commission, by contrast, merely tells us that notes from that day indicate that "Secretary Rumsfeld instructed Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible" and to consider "a wide range of options and possibilities". The Commission then adds:
The secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time ? not only Bin Laden. Secretary Rumsfeld later explained that at the time, he had been considering either one of them or perhaps someone else, as the responsible party. (335)
From the Commission's account alone, we would assume that Rumsfeld was thinking of hitting Saddam if and only if there was good evidence that he was "the responsible party." As the notes quoted by CBS and Bamford show, however, Rumsfeld wanted to use 9/11 as the basis for a "massive" response that would take care of many threats to American interests ("Sweep It Up"), especially Saddam Hussein, whether he was responsible or not ("Things related and not"). The Kean-Zelikow Commission, with its omission and distortions, hides this fact from us.
Furthermore, just as the Commission failed to point out the centrality of oil and military bases in the Bush administration's interest in Afghanistan, it does the same in relation to Iraq ? even though this country has the second largest known oil reserves in the world. The Commission does say that at a National Security Council meeting on September 17, "President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields" (335). But this is the sole hint in the Kean-Zelikow Report that the Bush administration might have had an interest in getting control of Iraqi oil.
Even this statement, moreover, is doubly qualified. Far from suggesting that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other members of the Bush administration were chomping at the bit to attack Iraq, as the PNAC letters reveal, the Commission suggests that the Bush administration would have thought of acting against Saddam only if he "acted against U.S. interests." And far from suggesting that getting control of Iraq's oil would be a central motivation, the Commission suggests that the plans for attack might only "possibly" include occupying Iraqi oil fields.
From other sources, however, we get quite a different pictures. Within months after 9/11, Paul O'Neill reports, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which works for Rumsfeld, had begun mapping Iraq's oil fields. It also provided a document, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," which suggested how Iraq's huge reserves might be divided up.66 The centrality of oil was also pointed out by Stephen Gowans, who wrote:
[T]he top item on the Pentagon's agenda, once it gave the order for jackboots to begin marching on Baghdad, was to secure the oil fields in southern Iraq. And when chaos broke out in Baghdad, US forces let gangs of looters and arsonists run riot through "the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information."...But at the Ministry of Oil, where archives and files related to all the oil wealth Washington has been itching to get its hands on, all was calm, for ringing the Ministry was a phalanx of tanks and armored personnel carriers.67
These accounts reveal the distorted picture provided by the 9/11 Commissioners, whose solitary mention of Iraq's oil suggests that US troops, if they attacked Iraq, might or might not occupy the oil fields.
A more realistic account is also given by Chalmers Johnson, who emphasizes that in relation to oil-rich regions, the US interest in oil and its interest in bases go hand in hand.
[The] renewed interest in Central, South, and Southwest Asia included the opening of military-to-military ties with the independent Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and support for a Taliban government in Afghanistan as a way to obtain gas and oil pipeline rights for an American-led consortium. But the jewel in the crown of this grand strategy was a plan to replace the Ba'ath regime in Iraq with a pro-American puppet government and build permanent military bases there.68
Johnson's emphasis on the motivation to establish more military bases is supported by PNAC itself, which said in its 2000 document:
[T]he United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.69
As this statement indicates, the plan was for the American military to remain in Iraq long after Saddam Hussein was deposed-perhaps until the exhaustion of the Iraqi oil reserves.
If we move beyond the 9/11 Commission's simplistic and noncontextual account of the Bush administration's reasons for attacking Iraq, we can see that the stakes were immense, involving not only trillions of dollars but also global geopolitical control. (For example, even if the United States will not need Iraqi oil in the near future, East Asia and Europe will, so that the United States, by controlling their oil supply, will be able to exert strong influence over their political-economic life.) Accordingly, we can see that the desire to attack an occupy Iraq, expressed by the same people who suggested that a "new Pearl Harbor" could be helpful, might have provided a motive for facilitating the attacks of 9/11.
The 9/11 Commission Report, however, omits all the parts of the story that might lead to this thought. We receive no idea that Iraq might have been "the jewel in the crown" of the US master plan. In the world of the Kean-Zelikow Report, in fact, America has no imperialistic master plan. It is simply an altruistic nation struggling to defend itself against enemies who hate its freedoms.
Summary
As I pointed out in the Introduction, The 9/11 Commission Report endorses the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were carried out solely by al-Qaeda, under the direction of Osama bin Laden. I am looking at this report from the perspective of the alternative conspiracy theory, according to which officials of the US government were involved. Although the Commission did not mention this alternative hypothesis, it was clearly seeking to undermine its plausibility. One way to do this would be to show that, contrary to those who hold this hypothesis, the Bush administration did not have any interests or plans that could have provided a sufficient motive for arranging or at least allowing such murderous attacks on its own citizens. The Commission did not do this directly, by explicitly addressing the motives alleged by those who endorse the alternative hypothesis. But it did not do it indirectly, by portraying the Bush administration, and the US government more generally, as devoid of motives in question.
The Kean-Zelikow Commission, however, could provide this portrayal only by means of numerous omissions and distortions. Besides omitting the Bush administration's reference to the 9/11 attacks as "opportunities," it omitted any discussion of the US Space Command, with its mission to solidify global dominance, and of the PNAC document, with its suggestion that a new Pearl Harbor would be helpful. It omitted historical facts showing that the Bush administration had plans to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11, so that the attacks served as a pretext rather than a cause. And the Commission distorted US motives in those attacks, portraying US leaders as interested only in self-defense, human rights, and peace, not oil, bases, and geopolitical primacy.
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