Posts Tagged ‘Twin Towers’

911 – ANNIVERSARY No. 11

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS – September 11th, 2012

The article below was written for the Journal of 9/11 Studies for the eleventh anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day that terminated accountable government and American liberty. It is posted here with the agreement of the editors.

In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy.

You only have to know two things.

One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs, mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all security agencies of America’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad. Not only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four times in one hour. NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US Air Force failed. The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed. Absolutely nothing worked. The world’s only superpower was helpless at the humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs.

It is hard to image a more far-fetched story–except for the second thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of any experts, to hold a pretend investigation.

On 9/11 Doubts Were Immediate

On September 11, 2001, a neighbor telephoned and said, “turn on the TV.” I assumed that a hurricane, possibly a bad one from the sound of the neighbor’s voice, was headed our way, and turned on the TV to determine whether we needed to shutter the house and leave.

What I saw was black smoke from upper floors of one of the World Trade Center towers. It didn’t seem to be much of a fire, and the reports were that the fire was under control. While I was trying to figure out why every TV network had its main news anchor covering an office fire, TV cameras showed an airplane hitting the other tower. It was then that I learned that both towers had been hit by airliners.

Cameras showed people standing at the hole in the side of the tower looking out. This didn’t surprise me. The airliner was minute compared to the massive building. But what was going on? Two accidents, one on top of the other?

The towers—the three-fourths or four-fifths of the buildings beneath the plane strikes–were standing, apparently largely undamaged. There were no signs of fire except in the vicinity of where the airliners had hit. Suddenly, one of the towers blew up, disintegrated, and disappeared in fine dust. Before one could make any sense of this, the same thing happened to the second tower, and it too disappeared into fine dust.

The TV news anchors compared the disintegration of the towers to controlled demolition. There were numerous reports of explosions throughout the towers from the base or sub-basements to the top. (Once the government put out the story of terrorist attack, references to controlled demolition and explosions disappeared from the print and TV media.) This made sense to me. Someone had blown up the buildings. It was completely obvious that the towers had not fallen down from asymmetrical structural damage. They had blown up.

The images of the airliners hitting the towers and the towers blowing up were replayed time and again. Airliners hit the top portions of the towers, and not long afterward the towers blew up. I turned off the TV wondering how it was that cameras had been ready to catch such an unusual phenomenon as an airplane flying into a skyscraper.

I don’t remember the time line, but it wasn’t long before the story was in place that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang had attacked the US. A passport had been found in the rubble. Another airliner had flown  into the Pentagon, and a fourth airliner had crashed or been shot down. Four airliners had been hijacked, meaning airport security had failed four times on the same morning. Terrorists had successfully assaulted America.

When I heard these reports, I wondered. How could a tiny undamaged passport be found in the rubble of two skyscrapers, each more than 100 stories tall, when bodies, office furniture and computers could not be found? How could airport security fail so totally that four airliners could be hijacked within the same hour? How could authorities know so conclusively and almost immediately the names of the perpetrators who pulled off such a successful attack on the world’s only superpower, when the authorities had no idea that such an attack was planned or even possible?

These questions disturbed me, because as a former member of the congressional staff and as a presidential appointee to high office, I had high level security clearances. In addition to my duties as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I had FEMA responsibilities in the event of nuclear attack. There was a mountain hideaway to which I was supposed to report in the event of a nuclear attack and from which I was supposed to take over the US government in the event no higher official survived the attack.

The more the story of 9/11 was presented in the media, the more wondrous it became. It is not credible that not only the CIA and FBI failed to detect the plot, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, which spies on everyone on the planet, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, Israel’s Mossad, and the intelligence agencies of Washington’s NATO allies. There are simply too many watchmen and too much infiltration of terrorist groups for such a complex attack to be prepared undetected and carried out undeterred.

Washington’s explanation of the attack implied a security failure too massive to be credible. Such a catastrophic failure of national security would mean that the US and Western Europe were never safe for one second during the Cold War, that the Soviet Union could have destroyed the entire West in one undetected fell swoop.

As a person whose colleagues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington were former secretaries of state, former national security advisors, former CIA directors, former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I was troubled by the story that a collection of individuals unsupported by a competent intelligence service had pulled off the events of 9/11.

As a person with high level government service, I knew that any such successful operation as 9/11 would have resulted in immediate demands from the White House, Congress, and the media for accountability. There would have been an investigation of how every aspect of US security could totally fail simultaneously in one morning. Such a catastrophic and embarrassing failure of the national security state would not be left unexamined.

NORAD failed. The US Air Force could not get jet fighters in the air. Air Traffic Control lost sight of the hijacked airliners. Yet, instead of launching an investigation, the White House resisted for one year the demands of the 9/11 families for an investigation. Neither the public, the media, nor Congress seemed to think an investigation was necessary. The focus was on revenge, which the Bush neocon regime said meant invading Afghanistan which was alleged to be sheltering the perpetrator, Osama bin Laden.

Normally, terrorists are proud of their success and announce their responsibility. It is a way to build a movement. Often a number of terrorist groups will compete in claiming credit for a successful operation. But Osama bin Laden in the last video that is certified by independent experts said that he had no responsibility for 9/11, that he had nothing against the American people, that his opposition was limited to the US government’s colonial policies and control over Muslim governments.

It makes no sense that the “mastermind” of the most humiliating blow in world history ever to have been delivered against a superpower would not claim credit for his accomplishment. By September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden knew that he was deathly ill. According to news reports he underwent kidney dialysis the following month. The most reliable reports that we have are that he died in December 2001. It is simply not credible that bin Laden denied responsibility because he feared Washington.

But Osama bin Laden was too useful a bogeyman, and Washington and the presstitute media kept him alive for another decade until Obama needed to kill the dead man in order to boost his sinking standings in the polls so that Democrats would not back a challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Numerous bin Laden videos, every one pronounced a fake by experts, were released whenever it was convenient for Washington. No one in the Western media or in the US Congress or European or UK parliaments was sufficiently intelligent to recognize that a bin Laden video always showed up on cue when Washington needed it. “Why would the ‘mastermind’ be so accommodating for Washington?” was the question that went through my mind every time one of the fake videos was released.

The 9/11 “investigation” that finally took place was a political one run from the White House. One member of the commission resigned, declaring the investigation to be a farce, and both co-chairman and the legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission distanced themselves from their report with statements that the 9/11 Commission was “set up to fail,” that resources were withheld from the commission, that representatives of the US military lied to the commission and that the commission considered referring the false testimony for criminal prosecution.

One would think that these revelations would cause a sensation, but the news media, Congress, the White House, and the public were silent.

All of this bothered me a great deal. The US had invaded two Muslim countries based on unsubstantiated allegations linking the two countries to 9/11, which itself remained uninvestigated. The neoconservatives who staffed the George W. Bush regime were advocating more invasions of more Muslim countries. Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, stated publicly that the Bush regime was planning to invade Iraq prior to 9/11. O’Neill said that no one at a National Security Council meeting even asked the question, why invade Iraq? “It was all about finding a way to do it.”

http://articles.cnn.com/2004-01-10/politics/oneill.bush_1_roomful-of-deaf-people-education-of-paul-o-neill-national-security-council-meeting?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS

The leaked top secret Downing Street Memo written by the head of British intelligence (MI6) confirms Paul O’Neill’s testimony. The memo, known as the “smoking gun memo” whose authenticity has been confirmed, states that “President George W. Bush wants to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” In other words, the US invasion of Iraq was based on nothing but a made up lie.

As an engineering student I had witnessed a controlled demolition. When films of the collapse of WTC building 7 emerged, it was obvious that building 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition. When physics instructor David Chandler measured the descent of the building and established that it took place at free fall acceleration, the case was closed. Buildings cannot enter free fall unless controlled demolition has removed all resistance to the collapsing floors.

If airliners brought down two skyscrapers, why was controlled demolition used to bring down a third building?

I assumed that structural architects, structural engineers, and physicists would blow the whistle on the obviously false story. If I could see that something was amiss, certainly more highly trained people would.

The first physicist to make an effective and compelling argument was Steven Jones at BYU. Jones said that explosives brought down the twin towers. He made a good case. For his efforts, he was pressured to resign his tenured position. I wondered whether the federal government had threatened BYU’s research grants or whether patriotic trustees and alumni were the driving force behind Jones’ expulsion. Regardless, the message was clear to other university based experts: “Shut up or we’ll get you.”

Steven Jones was vindicated when chemist Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen In Denmark reported unequivocally that the scientific team in which he participated found nano-thermite in the residue of the twin towers. This sensational finding was not mentioned in the US print and TV media to my knowledge.

Several years after 9/11 architect Richard Gage formed Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth, an organization that has grown to include 1,700 experts. The plans of the towers have been studied. They were formidable structures. They were constructed to withstand airliner hits and fires. There is no credible explanation of their failure except intentional demolition.

I also found disturbing the gullibility of the public, media, and Congress in the unquestioning acceptance of the official stories of the shoe-bomber, shampoo and bottled water bomber, and underwear bomber plots to blow up airliners in transit. These schemes are farcical. How can we believe that al Qaeda, capable of pulling off the most fantastic terrorist attack in history and capable of devising improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that kill and maim US troops and destroy US military vehicles would rely on something that had to be lighted with a match? The shoe and underwear bombers would simply have pushed a button on their cell phones or laptops, and the liquid bomb would not have required extended time in a lavatory to be mixed (all to no effect).

None of this makes any sense. Moreover, experts disputed many of the government’s claims, which were never backed by anything but the government’s story line. There is no independent evidence that anything was involved other than firecracker powders.

The case of the underwear bomber is especially difficult to accept. According to witnesses, the underwear bomber was not allowed on the airliner, because he had no passport. So an official appears who walks him onto the airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas day. What kind of official has the authority to override established rules, and what did the official think would happen to the passenger when he presented himself to US Customs without a passport? Any official with the power to override standard operating practices would know that it was pointless to send a passenger to a country where his entry would be rejected.

The circumstantial evidence is that these were orchestrated events designed to keep fear alive, to create new intrusive powers for a new over-arching federal policy agency, to accustom US citizens to intrusive searches and a police force to conducting them, and to sell expensive porno-scanners and now more advanced devices to the Transportation Safety Administration. Apparently, this expensive collection of high-tech gadgetry is insufficient to protect us from terrorists, and in August 2012 the Department of Homeland Security put in an order for 750 million rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot every person in the US 2.5 times.

Naive and gullible Americans claim that if some part of the US government had been involved in 9/11, “someone would have talked by now.” A comforting thought, perhaps, but nothing more. Consider, for example, the cover-up by the US government of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed or wounded most of the crew but failed to sink the ship. As the survivors have testified, they were ordered in a threatening way not to speak about the event. It was twelve years later before one of the USS Liberty’s officers, James Ennes, told the story of the attack in his book, Assault on the Liberty. I continue to wonder how the professionals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology feel about being maneuvered by the federal government into the unscientific position NIST took concerning the destruction of the WTC towers.

What will be the outcome of the doubts about the official story raised by experts? I worry that most Americans are too mentally and emotionally weak to be able to come to grips with the truth. They are far more comfortable with the story that enemies attacked America successfully despite the massive national security state in place. The American public has proved itself to be so cowardly that it willingly, without a peep, sacrificed its civil liberty and the protections of law guaranteed by the Constitution in order to be “safe.”

Congress is not about to expose itself for having squandered trillions of dollars on pointless wars based on an orchestrated “new Pearl Harbor.” When the neoconservatives said that a “new Pearl Harbor” was a requirement for their wars for American/Israeli hegemony, they set the stage for the 21st century wars that Washington has launched. If Syria falls, there is only Iran, and then Washington stands in direct confrontation with Russia and China.

Unless Russia and China can be overthrown with “color revolutions,” these two nuclear powers are unlikely to submit to Washington’s hegemony. The world as we know it might be drawing to a close.

If enough Americans or even other peoples in the world had the intelligence to realize that massive steel structures do not disintegrate into fine dust because a flimsy airliner hits them and limited short-lived fires burn on a few floors, Washington would be faced with the suspicion it deserves.

If 9/11 was actually the result of the failure of the national security state to deter an attack, the government’s refusal to conduct a real investigation is an even greater failure. It has fallen to concerned and qualified individuals to perform the investigative role abandoned by government. The presentations at the Toronto Hearings, along with the evaluations of the Panel, are now available, as is the documentary film, “Explosive Evidence–Experts Speak Out,” provided by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

The government’s agents and apologists try to deflect attention from disturbing facts by redefining factual evidence revealed by experts as the product of “a conspiracy culture.” If people despite their brainwashing and lack of scientific education are able to absorb the information made available to them, perhaps both the US Constitution and peace could be restored. Only informed people can restrain Washington and avert the crazed hegemonic US government from destroying the world in war.

_____________________________________

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. For further information and articles please visit http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/

Copyright Paul Craig Roberts. This article is published with his permission.

TEN YEARS AFTER

By Matt Johnson

Time speeds up the older you get, possibly because each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of your age and also because, as life moves on, perception shifts accordingly. Although it has now been ten years since 9/11, it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was typing a small piece for this website in its immediate aftermath.

My family and I had plane tickets to return home to New York on 9/10 but, for various reasons, we’d stayed in Europe. If we had returned that day I’d probably have been wandering the streets besides the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks, as both my son’s school and my studio were just a couple of blocks from there, and whenever I returned from Europe, I was invariably awake early due to jet lag and usually walking around downtown. As it transpired, I watched events unfold from Sweden.

The attacks themselves were so shocking that, in the blazing intensity of that moment, it was possible to believe almost anything. Anti-Muslim hysteria was swiftly whipped-up into a frenzy as the culprits were quickly identified as Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. This, despite the previous error of instantly blaming Muslims following the Oklahoma City bombing, only to rapidly retract when it became clear the terrorists were, in fact, white, ex-military Americans.

Yet, as weeks and months of fevered speculation followed, the doubts began to nag. Two things specifically stuck in my mind like pebbles in a shoe. First, around a year before 9/11, I’d read some disturbing extracts from the document ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’—a report by a Neo-Con think tank, a cabal of warmongers, named the Project For The New American Century (PNAC). It laid out their agenda in chilling detail. A sentence that especially jumped out is on page 51: ‘the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event—like a new Pearl Harbour’. As the Neo-Cons had recently assumed control of the US government through the rigged election of George W. Bush, this seemed especially relevant.

The second pebble was a radio broadcast I’d heard in 1999 on local New York radio station WBAI. I can’t remember the name of the show or the name of its host, but he was an ex-military veteran of considerable experience, and I distinctly remember him warning, with some urgency, that malevolent forces had been infiltrating the upper echelons of the military/industrial/intelligence complex and, as a consequence, very dark clouds were now forming on the horizon of America. He warned listeners to be extremely vigilant. I got goose bumps whilst listening as he seemed so sincere and passionate.

And so now, ten years after, as we bear witness to yet another choreographed commemoration, another orgy of flag waving, is the general public any wiser as to who was really behind the defining event of our age? An event which not only caused the loss of thousands of innocent American lives but which has subsequently destroyed millions of innocent Muslims’ lives and led to a state of permanent war abroad and a virtual police state in America.

Watching and reading mainstream media, you wouldn’t think there were any doubts at all. In actual fact the majority of them are now so tightly aligned with the foreign policy aims of Western governments that much of their output amounts to little more than state stenography. A more accurate description of this monolithic corporate media would be Ministry of Propaganda, and a more accurate description of many of its journalists would be, to quote Gerald Celente, ‘presstitutes’.

Lately, this output has become an Orwellian parody as illegal invasions and seizures of the resources of sovereign nations by the West are passed off, with a perfectly straight face, as spreading our cherished values of freedom, democracy and human rights. Citizens of these nations are to be bombed by NATO for their own protection, of course.

Such malignant schemes, delivering ‘democracy’ to a country at gunpoint whilst thieving its resources, are obviously long in the plotting, and a complicit media is therefore essential to keep the wool pulled firmly over the eyes of the population of the aggressor nation. As unrest is fomented on the ground of the target country; on cue, the Western media begin beating the drums for war in the guise of humanitarian intervention, and public opinion is consequently dragged into line like a dog on a leash.

In Britain, the BBC—despite a previous worthy attempt to take the Blair government to task over the dodgy dossier affair that helped launch the illegal invasion of Iraq—has since been castrated. Their coverage of the recent attack upon Libya and the true motives behind it was worse than useless, and misled the British public throughout.

It is now left to independent journalists and other outsiders, speaking through the growing alternative media and the Internet, to alert and inform the general public. But how long until the Internet itself is under assault? What will be the excuse to control it, I wonder? Terrorism? Fraud? Pornography? National Security?

So, will we ever discover who was really behind 9/11? My own feeling is that we know a seed by its fruit and it’s now clear, for all to see, the grotesque varieties dangling from the vast tree of death that has emerged from the footprints of the Twin Towers. To know who planted the seed we must simply ask ourselves whose interests have been best served in the decade since 9/11? A decade of near psychopathic aggression and imperial adventure by America, aided by Britain and Israel, which has borne Guantanamo Bay, Abu Gharib, illegal US/NATO invasions of sovereign nations, routine violations of the Geneva Convention, extraordinary renditions, torture, secret CIA prisons, water-boarding, totalitarian police state measures, the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bill of Rights shredded, the loss of habeas corpus, NSA wiretaps, TSA groping, innocent citizens regularly labelled potential terrorists, a population kept in a state of frenzied fear and herded like sheep. The list is virtually endless and the America many of us once loved is now descending, at an increasing pace, into a corporate fascist state.

Who can doubt that the entire post-9/11 agenda has not fully served the nefarious Neo-Cons/Neo-Fascists? Although it is worth bearing in mind, of course, that since WW2, the USA has bombed 30 countries, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, attempted to overthrow over 50 governments (many democratically elected), and crushed or subverted liberation movements in 20 countries. But these policies have now been placed on steroids by the Neo-Cons.

As an informed citizen, it’s always useful to continually remind yourself that your government lies to you—most of the time. Yet it’s also important to remind yourself that anyone who dares question these official lies, such as the fairy tale of 9/11, as laid out in the Kean-Hamilton Commission Report, will be routinely ridiculed or marginalized as a crank, paranoiac, commie, freak, anti-American—or, of course, a conspiracy theorist.

Yet when is a conspiracy theory not a conspiracy theory? Just in my lifetime, conspiracy theories which turned out to be conspiracy facts include Operation Northwoods, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, USS Liberty incident, MK Ultra, Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, Iraq-WMD, amongst countless others. It always amazes me that so many otherwise intelligent people still doubt that Western governments can so casually lie, spy, and conspire against their own populations.

In Britain recently, the scales must surely have fallen from the eyes of even the most brainwashed and patriotic individual as the lid was briefly lifted on the seething, festering nest of corruption known as the phone-hacking scandal. The fact that so many of Britain’s ruling elite were coated in the slime of this corruption, from top policemen and politicians to media barons and members of the judiciary—and we’ve not even mentioned the banksters—surely didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone with a scintilla of intuition? Forget the feral underclass of the recent UK riots; here are the real looters of Britain—the venal overclass.

Truth, like life itself, yearns to see the light and, as more and more compelling evidence emerged in the last decade, it became increasingly clear—to anyone with an open mind, that is—that the biggest conspiracy theory of our age is the official version of 9/11. There were just too many bizarre coincidences, too many unexplained events, too much suspicious behaviour that has gone unexplained. It was just not possible to take it seriously. It was a cover up. A whitewash.

It would be naive in the extreme to assume that classic terror tactics, such as false flag operations, agent provocateurs and other black ops, have not evolved in sophistication to match the breath-taking technology of the latest military hardware. Al Qaeda, assuming it exists, is likely to be an asset trained and controlled by the CIA and operated like a marionette. Because, without such an ‘outside’ threat, there could be no justification for the never-ending ‘War on Terror’ or, pertinently, it’s never-ending budget. It is a war against an enemy that is both everywhere and nowhere. It is un-winnable—which is exactly its purpose.

But the biggest question underlying all of the above is: who are the real puppet masters? Who funds these extremist think tanks? Who pre-selects the candidates for government? Who pulls the strings of our representatives once they are ‘elected’? Who secretly directs the intelligence services? Governments come and governments go, but the real power behind the throne is continuous, and asserts its baleful influence upon an unwitting population from the shadows, all the while plotting global hegemony. It is into those shadows, into that darkness, that we must collectively shine our lights.