On September 11, 2001 the world watched in shock and disbelief as planes flew in to New Yorks World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, and Americans realized they were under attack. But by whom? What really happened? In The Unofficial Story, the fifth estates Bob McKeown introduces us to people who believe the real force behind the attacks was not Osama Bin Laden, but the U.S. government itself.
Emerging from the dust and debris that day was a movement, known these days as 9/11 Truth or truthers people who believe that 9/11 was part of a vast conspiracy and cover-up by a criminal faction within the U.S. government. As the fifth estate reports, public opinion polls now show that the majority of Americans believe the Bush Administration had advance knowledge of those attacks and somehow allowed them to happen and that one-third of Canadians share the same belief.
In The Unofficial Story, Bob McKeown explores why these questions and theories are growing in popularity.
Youll meet some of the leading proponents of truther theories: Richard Gage, an American architect, explains how the WTC twin towers and the lesser known Tower #7 could only have crumbled as they did due to explosive charges placed inside the buildings. Others, including Canadian professor Kee Dewdney, insist that the story of the brave fight by the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 must have been a hoax. But, youll also hear from others who dispel truther theories and try to understand why, from JFKs assassination to the moon landing to 9/11, a culture of conspiracy springs up around certain historic events.
Despite the difference of opinion between those who blame the hijackers and those who blame their own government, the real importance of the fight over 9/11 truth is that it may have less to do with the past than the future.
Full Length and Interviews Here: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2009-2010/the…
Newly decoded data provided by an independent researcher and computer programmer from Australia exposes alarming evidence that the reported hijacking aboard American Airlines Flight 77 was impossible to have existed. A data parameter labeled “FLT DECK DOOR”, cross checks with previously decoded data obtained by Pilots For 9/11 Truth from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) through the Freedom Of Information Act.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 departed Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 am Eastern Time. According to reports and data, a hijacking took place between 08:50:54 and 08:54:11[1] in which the hijackers allegedly crashed the aircraft into the Pentagon at 09:37:45. Reported by CNN, according to Ted Olson, wife Barbara Olson had called him from the reported flight stating, “…all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers…”[2]. However, according to Flight Data provided by the NTSB, the Flight Deck Door was never opened in flight. How were the hijackers able to gain access to the cockpit, remove the pilots, and navigate the aircraft to the Pentagon if the Flight Deck Door remained closed?[3]
Founded in August 2006, Pilots For 9/11 Truth is a growing organization of aviation professionals from around the globe. The organization has analyzed Data provided by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for the Pentagon Attack, the events in Shanksville, PA and the World Trade Center attack. The data does not support the government story. The NTSB/FBI refuse to comment. Pilots For 9/11 Truth do not offer theory or point blame at this point in time. However, there is a growing mountain of conflicting information and data in which government agencies and officials along with Mainstream Media refuse to acknowledge. Pilots For 9/11 Truth Core member list continues to grow.
On Sunday, September 27 at 2 p.m., The New York City Coalition for Accountability Now (NYC CAN), a group comprising 9/11 family members, first responders and survivors, will march from Battery Park to City Hall in protest of the City’s attempt to block the referendum for a fresh probe of the 9/11 attacks from going on the November ballot.
The effort to establish a local commission to pick up where the 9/11 Commission left off comes just as the 9/11 Commission’s Chief Counsel John Farmer released a book entitled “The Ground Truth” in which he claims “at some level of government, at some point in time. . . there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”
Eighty-thousand New Yorkers have signed the petition as it has won the endorsement of 2002 TIME magazine person of the year, and former FBI agent, Coleen Rowley, as well as outspoken 9/11 victims’ family members including Bill Doyle, who lost his son Joey, and Lorie Van Auken, who lost her husband Kenneth. Van Auken is one of the esteemed ‘Jersey Girls’ who successfully lobbied the federal government to set up the 9/11 Commission only to have 70% of her group’s questions to the Commission go unanswered.
Speakers for the Battery Park rally include 9/11 family members Bob McIlvaine and Manny Badillo, New York University’s Professor of Media Studies, Mark Crispin Miller, and actor Daniel Sunjata of the Emmy-winning Fox Television series “Rescue Me” which depicts post-9/11 life in a FDNY firehouse. After a half-hour speakers’ program, 9/11 family members and first responders will lead thousands of supporters in a march past Ground Zero, The City Clerk’s Office and The State Supreme Court, all the way to the steps of City Hall.
This week NYC CAN submitted a memorandum of law in response to the City’s challenge of the petition’s legality. The Court-appointed referee is scheduled to submit his report and recommendations to the Court on Monday, September 28. The Court will decide whether or not to adopt the referee’s recommendations and then issue a decision, after which appeals will likely follow immediately. “The arguments are strong on both sides, so the judges will have some thinking and analyzing to do,” said Dennis McMahon, the Petitioners’ attorney. “No other case pending in the New York courts has a higher priority on the calendars than this one, so we should have a definitive answer by next week.”
If the Court decides in NYC CAN’s favor and 15,000 of the 28,000 additional signatures submitted on September 4 are deemed valid by the City Clerk, the referendum will go on this November’s ballot. If the referendum passes, it would lead to the creation of a local, independent commission with subpoena power that would be tasked with comprehensively reinvestigating the attacks. For more info: http://www.nyccan.org.
It blew in like a hurricane from hell, pouring by 8 a.m. when the victims’ family members began reading off the names of their lost, often losing it themselves. Perhaps it was a rain of tears, a storm whipped up by a wind of fury that the ache of loss had not washed away with tears or the rain or the eight years passed since 9/11/01, on that loveliest of cloudless, sunny, cool fall mornings, accentuating the irony and pain of remembrance still more.
9/11 Truth activists that gathered in New York City last Friday for the eighth anniversary of the WTC attacks.
Even the young protesters from WeAreChange.Org were sparse, staring at the rain and wind tearing umbrellas away, leaving them to hunch in ponchos, jackets, or bare it all in their black and white 9/11 Was an Inside Job T-shirts. I didn’t arrive unti after 10, and then, did so with a feeling of approach avoidance. The suffering of these events was silent even for those who hadn’t lost anyone specifically or perhaps a friend or acquaintance or two. Yet, the cops were there and the endless barricades they had set up, creating a maze just to get from the subway to the Vesey Street side of Christ’s Church. Nothing like a bit of harassment to start the day.
Of course, I remembered the earlier years of 9/11 when the church, the graveyard, the stones and iron fence were a grayish white, a ghost landscape thanks to the pyroplastic cloud of a million tons of concrete and poisons and god knew what else that settled on them, the earth, the surrounding streets, even as thousands of visitors flooded in from all over the world, some of them victims’ relatives, others simply there in sympathy, some in sheer curiosity at the devastation.
Physically, Ground Zero hadn’t changed that much since then. The only newly constructed completed building you could point to is, ironically, Larry Silverstein’s Tower Seven, a large thumb in your face that made you want to snap it off at its joint to cause that sonofabitch sitting up there a pain back in kind. I’d heard him earlier on Channel One TV, whining that he couldn’t get the full financing he needed to complete the projects of rebuilding that he so cannily had cornered. Perhaps it was his payback, above and beyond his $500 million insurance profit for Tower Seven alone that helped him put up his building so quickly.
One’s mind flashed over the usual 9/11 suspects as the wind and rain beat on your face and washed them away, cooling your simmering emotions. In fact, there among the gathering crowd of protestors was my friend John Uhlich from Chicago, standing with a poster of his 20-year old cousin who had been lost in Tower One. John, an engineer on the Union Pacific line, made this pilgrimage each year to honor his cousin, and to protest the infamy that brought that young life to its violent end. I had befriended John the previous year and shown him then the first copy of my new book State Of Shock – Poems from 9/11 on. He greeted me with a smile and firm handshake. We’d had dinner the night before and he brought a copy for me to sign.
I immediately felt better, realizing the only real destinations in life are people, those who put a human face and emotion on landscapes, who bring it alive with their talk, their knowledge, their experience. At some point, Luke Rudkowski, the leader of WeAreChange came over and told us we were about to march to Tower Seven and should do so in twos, loosely banded, as if we weren’t connected, as if that would fool anyone that we were one solid band of protestors. Nevertheless, we did our best to play the game and placate the cops, leaving sidewalk space for the curious, the press and steady stream of working people for whom this might be just another day.
In general, there seemed to be fewer police, especially the storm trooper types, with their mottled bullet-proof vests, automatic rifles crossed over their chests, and neo-Nazi style helmets fastened by chin-strips, black from head to jackboots. They often stood in lines across from us, at attention and at the ready it seemed to open fire. Rumor had it, though, that many scattered throughout the ranks believe in us and our cause, especially given their numbers lost in 9/11’s grim chaos. I had some trouble believing it, because like the firemen, bless their soul, these men and women were generally conservative, whose employer after all was the government, among which were the true perps.
WeAreChange Minnesota.
Nevertheless, a tone of mutual respect governed the scene, with the exception of two provocateurs. One had on a chartreuse wig of feathers and matching body suit, the other dressed like a prehistoric gorilla. Their design was to start trouble and make us look crazy as they were to the cameras and passersby. I won’t grace this page with their names. For me, they are barely human, nameless troublemakers, agents or nutcases most probably being paid by one agency or another to try to start trouble. The WeAreChange Security identified them to the police who told them to take off. And they did, fortunately for them.
One of the beauties of these marches is that during the times between marching, when traffic is being allowed to pass, you meet new people of like minds, exchange information and stories, and get a sense of the deep concern, deep as your own, shared by these people. It buoys your heart which is often sunk by the deadhead skepticism, close-mindedness you are met with by every day people, wise-asses looking for trouble, and those who look at you like you were committing some travesty of disrespect against the dead and their families, when in fact you are seeking the justice they themselves wish for the true culprits.
So, this is a psychic as well as a physical march which takes your energy on both levels, so you must lift your spirits with your fellow-believers. This year, again, in the windy, relentless rain, those spirits seemed dampened as well. Yet they trod on. At some point in the afternoon John and I leave the march for some lunch, some soup and sandwiches at a friendly Greek deli. We are both attending the WeAreChange event at Slate, a club venue, at 5 PM which would feature a number of first responders, activists, and even me, reading from my book. So John and I were nursing our energy, particularly myself, who had been battling a cough for the entire month of August. This business of protest, I had to believe, took its toll on you.
As we sat in the bustling deli, the sounds of life went on, people at late lunches, the clatter of plates, laughter, conversations in several languages, all I thought that went on that first 9/11 in 01, when it all was so suddenly shattered by the smack of airliners, the explosions beneath and above and all through the Towers, coated by aerosolized super-thermate, thanks to nanotechnology.
All the talk, the laughter, the intimacies of fellow workers I envisioned shattered in an instant as that first plane hit, and then the second, and the mayhem was ubiquitous, the sliding falls into that pyroplastic cloud that roamed the streets like a wild tsunami, engulfing all in its wake and leaving a ruin that would claim the lives and health of many thousands of first responders, what I called the second round of slaughter. But here I was moving forward again with John in the rain and looking at life in the rearview mirror. Lunch over, we found the subway and disappeared uptown, agreeing to meet at slate between 5 and 6 PM.
Somewhere the march continued with the bravest of souls from the west to east side of town, turning the heads of the straight and narrow, stopping others in their tracks, chanting sound-bites, telling people whether they wished to hear it or not that there was another way to think about this tragedy, that it was just one more in an ancient history of false flag operations, to create a reason to attack those from whom you wanted something, in this case Muslim oil and real estate, and ultimately hegemonic control of the world in a New World Order.
Those brave marchers would settle at One Police Plaza, in the belly of the potential beast, trying to convince even its protectors that we/that they had their brothers and sister’s best interest at heart. This was no mean feat and not for the feint of heart. But then these young people of WeAreChange and allied groups had the zeal, the strength, the conviction of the brave at heart. And in their raspy chants, sore by now, from the cold, the rain and the wind, they made themselves felt and heard, at whatever cost. Bless them all.
At Slate
At a quarter to six, the rain and wind were still at it, as I reached Slate’s club, carrying a carton of 20 of my books to sell or give away. I had a copy in that bag with the 10 or so poems listed that I had carefully picked out and timed. I had half an hour. No sooner did I arrive and some young fellow was making a beautiful, impassioned speech on behalf of the first responders, Luke asked me if I wanted to go on next. Next, I just got here! He looked and smiled, why not? For real why not? Okay, let’s do it. But I need a stand, Luke, to put my book and papers on. No problem.
The crowd was my exhausted brothers and sisters having a drink in a large circle around the speaker and mike on its stand. They went hundreds deep, from all walks of life, the bold, the quiet, the thoughtful, the truly hurt, the smart and smarter, ex-veterans of Iraq, first responders, sympathizers, marchers, one muscled arm and fist. My god, this wasn’t your 92nd Street Y literati set (and who wanted them). These were my people.
Before I had time to take off my rain jacket or sweater or wipe off my sweat, Luke introduced me and life pulled me into the light, my hands shaking, the mike before me, and I talked to the crowd, read to them, poured every bit of strength I had to bring those poems (written for them) alive. And it seemed to work. No one threw fruit. But applause sounded every each piece. The gauntlet, the trial by fire, turned out friendly, and when I was finished, many hands thrust themselves out for shaking, many pats on the back came, and I was home among my people. What a great feeling.
Past me, came others. First responders who told of endless sufferings, of insurance companies trying to minimize their chronic, killing injuries, lying doctors saying they were exaggerating, crippling their souls and those of their families. They had thousands of dollars a month in drug costs. One man, who had been a volunteer from Pennsylvania, who had simply left work on 9/11/01, drove to Jersey, parked his car, and walked the Washington Bridge, then traveled down to Ground Zero to work in and around the pit ceaselessly. He was there with his son of seven or eight on his shoulders, a beautiful blond-haired boy. They were heartbreaking, the two of them, and he with his tales of illness received in the name of his effort to help his country.
I found out later the man’s name is John Citara. Robert Wanek wrote a piece about a Fundraiser For John Citara. This link will take you to WeAreChange. Scroll down until you find the article.
Robert Wanek: The Story Of John Citara (He Needs Our Help)
There were several others who were half-crazed from fear and pain, one man on suicide watch, struggling with an existential turmoil and pain that one could barely imagine. They were simply staring death in the face as life went on in this warm room filled with friends, warmed with alcohol, and out of the wind, rain and chill. My friend John was near and other friends of mine, as well as my wife. The barrage of pain we took was only a shadow of what was felt by these desperate and loyal souls. If there was a god in heaven, was he listening? Would he or someone bring justice to these sick and dying men? Could all of the efforts of the healthy have an effect? One could only hope and pray.
At some point, exhausted from my own physical issue, I said goodbye to my friends and left with my wife for home. We walked through the somewhat subsided rain to the subway, looking like a bunker for a coming onslaught that I didn’t even wish to imagine. And the train roared into the station, swallowed us into its rainbow crowd, and rumbled uptown to our stop. We got out, stopped at a small, inexpensive French restaurant and ordered a late dinner, practically speechless, not aided by the overly loud music.
We ate with the relish of real hunger. Paid the check. The handsome French owner offered us each a 50 percent off card good for dinner any Tuesday night. Life could be sweet. Bon nuit. We stepped into the street. The rain and the wind were gone like the day itself. The air smelled clean and fresh. Life went on all about us on Broadway, from beautiful people to perennial beggars. We walked home.
I watched the tail end of a Yankee game, in my pajamas, in bed. My wife straightened out the house. Life went on. Life goes on. Tomorrow, Saturday was another day of 9/11 events at St. Mark’s Church. Sunday the sun was promised and I was headed for the woods upstate. I fell asleep before the game ended, listening to the crowds from the stadium cheering for something. Maybe it was simply for the joy of being alive. Bless the living as we mourn the lost was the last thought I remember having before the curtain fell on another day. And we shall overcome!
An article in the journal, Sociological Inquiry, [“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification, Vol. 79, No. 2. (2009), pp. 142-162. [PDF] casts light on the effectiveness of propaganda. Researchers examined why big lies succeed where little lies fail. Governments can get away with mass deceptions, but politicians cannot get away with sexual affairs.
The researchers explain why so many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it has become obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with the event. Americans developed elaborate rationalizations based on Bush administration propaganda that alleged Iraqi involvement and became deeply attached to their beliefs. Their emotional involvement became wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality. They looked for information that supported their beliefs and avoided information that challenged them, regardless of the facts of the matter.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the believability of the Big Lie as compared to the small lie: “In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
What the sociologists and Hitler are telling us is that by the time facts become clear, people are emotionally wedded to the beliefs planted by the propaganda and find it a wrenching experience to free themselves. It is more comfortable, instead, to denounce the truth-tellers than the liars whom the truth-tellers expose.
The psychology of belief retention even when those beliefs are wrong is a pillar of social cohesion and stability. It explains why, once change is effected, even revolutionary governments become conservative. The downside of belief retention is its prevention of the recognition of facts. Belief retention in the Soviet Union made the system unable to adjust to economic reality, and the Soviet Union collapsed. Today in the United States millions find it easier to chant “USA, USA, USA” than to accept facts that indicate the need for change.
The staying power of the Big Lie is the barrier through which the 9/11 Truth Movement is finding it difficult to break. The assertion that the 9/11 Truth Movement consists of conspiracy theorists and crackpots is obviously untrue. The leaders of the movement are highly qualified professionals, such as demolition experts, physicists, structural architects, engineers, pilots, and former high officials in the government. Unlike their critics parroting the government’s line, they know what they are talking about.
Here is a link to a presentation by the architect, Richard Gage, to a Canadian university audience: The video of the presentation is two hours long and seems to have been edited to shorten it down to two hours. Gage is low-key, but not a dazzling personality or a very articulate presenter. Perhaps that is because he is speaking to a university audience and takes for granted their familiarity with terms and concepts.
Those who believe the official 9/11 story and dismiss skeptics as kooks can test the validity of the sociologists’ findings and Hitler’s observation by watching the video and experiencing their reaction to evidence that challenges their beliefs. Are you able to watch the presentation without scoffing at someone who knows far more about it than you do? What is your response when you find that you cannot defend your beliefs against the evidence presented? Scoff some more? Become enraged?
Another problem that the 9/11 Truth Movement faces is that few people have the education to follow the technical and scientific aspects. The side that they believe tells them one thing; the side that they don’t believe tells them another. Most Americans have no basis to judge the relative merits of the arguments.
For example, consider the case of the Lockerbie bomber. One piece of “evidence” that was used to convict Magrahi was a piece of circuit board from a device that allegedly contained the Semtex that exploded the airliner. None of the people, who have very firm beliefs in Magrahi’s and Libya’s guilt and in the offense of the Scottish authorities in releasing Magrahi on allegedly humanitarian grounds, know that circuit boards of those days have very low combustion temperatures and go up in flames easily. Semtex produces very high temperatures. There would be nothing whatsoever left of a device that contained Semtex. It is obvious to an expert that the piece of circuit board was planted after the event.
I have asked on several occasions and have never had an answer, which does not mean that there isn’t one, how millions of pieces of unburnt, uncharred paper can be floating over lower Manhattan from the destruction of the WTC towers when the official explanation of the destruction is fires so hot and evenly distributed that they caused the massive steel structures to weaken and fail simultaneously so that the buildings fell in free fall time just as they would if they had been brought down by controlled demolition.
What is the explanation of fires so hot that steel fails but paper does not combust?
People don’t even notice the contradictions. Recently, an international team of scientists, who studied for 18 months dust samples produced by the twin towers’ destruction collected from three separate sources, reported their finding of nano-thermite in the dust. The US government had scientists dependent on the US government to debunk the finding on the grounds that the authenticity of custody of the samples could not be verified. In other words, someone had tampered with the samples and added the nano-thermite. This is all it took to discredit the finding, despite the obvious fact that access to thermite is strictly controlled and NO ONE except the US military and possibly Israel has access to nano-thermite.
The physicist, Steven Jones, has produced overwhelming evidence that explosives were used to bring down the buildings. His evidence is not engaged, examined, tested, and refuted. It is simply ignored.
Dr. Jones’ experience reminds me of that of my Oxford professor, the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was one of the 20th century’s great scientists. At one time every section chairman of the Royal Society was a Polanyi student. Many of his students won Nobel Prizes for their scientific work, such as Eugene Wigner at Princeton and Melvin Calvin at UC, Berkeley, and his son, John Polanyi, at the University of Toronto.
As a young man in the early years of the 20th century, Michael Polanyi discovered the explanation for chemical adsorption. Scientific authority found the new theory too much of a challenge to existing beliefs and dismissed it. Even when Polanyi was one of the UK’s ranking scientists, he was unable to teach his theory. One half-century later his discovery was re-discovered by scientists at UC, Berkeley. The discovery was hailed, but then older scientists said that it was “Polanyi’s old error.” It turned out not to be an error. Polanyi was asked to address scientists on this half-century failure of science to recognize the truth. How had science, which is based on examining the evidence, gone so wrong. Polanyi’s answer was that science is a belief system just like everything else, and that his theory was outside the belief system.
That is what we observe all around us, not just about the perfidy of Muslims and 9/11.
As an economics scholar I had a very difficult time making my points about the Soviet economy, about Karl Marx’s theories, and about the supply-side impact of fiscal policy. Today I experience readers who become enraged just because I report on someone else’s work that is outside their belief system. Some readers think I should suppress work that is inconsistent with their beliefs and drive the author of the work into the ground. These readers never have any comprehension of the subject. They are simply emotionally offended.
What I find puzzling is the people I know who do not believe a word the government says about anything except 9/11. For reasons that escape me, they believe that the government that lies to them about everything else tells them the truth about 9/11. How can this be, I ask them. Did the government slip up once and tell the truth? My question does not cause them to rethink their belief in the government’s 9/11 story. Instead, they get angry with me for doubting their intelligence or their integrity or some such hallowed trait.
The problem faced by truth is the emotional needs of people. With 9/11 many Americans feel that they must believe their government so that they don’t feel like they are being unsupportive or unpatriotic, and they are very fearful of being called “terrorist sympathizers.” Others on the left-wing have emotional needs to believe that peoples oppressed by the US have delivered “blowbacks.” Some leftists think that America deserves these blowbacks and thus believe the government’s propaganda that Muslims attacked the US.
Naive people think that if the US government’s explanation of 9/11 was wrong, physicists and engineers would all speak up. Some have (see above). However, for most physicists and engineers this would be an act of suicide. Physicists owe their careers to government grants, and their departments are critically dependent on government funding. A physicist who speaks up essentially ends his university career. If he is a tenured professor, to appease Washington the university would buy out his tenure as BYU did in the case of the outspoken Steven Jones.
An engineering firm that spoke out would never again be awarded a government contract. In addition, its patriotic, flag-waving customers would regard the firm as a terrorist apologist and cease to do business with it.
In New York today there is an enormous push by 9/11 families for a real and independent investigation of the 9/11 events. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have provided the necessary signatures on petitions that require the state to put the proposal for an independent commission up to vote. However, the state, so far, is not obeying the law.
Why are the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who are demanding a real investigation dismissed as conspiracy theorists? The 9/11 skeptics know far more about the events of that day than do the uninformed people who call them names. Most of the people I know who are content with the government’s official explanation have never examined the evidence. Yet, these no-nothings shout down those who have studied the matter closely.
There are, of course, some kooks. I have often wondered if these kooks are intentionally ridiculous in order to discredit knowledgeable skeptics.
Another problem that the 9/11 Truth Movement faces is that their natural allies, those who oppose the Bush/Obama wars and the internet sites that the antiwar movement maintains, are fearful of being branded traitorous and anti-American. It is hard enough to oppose a war against those the US government has successfully demonized. Antiwar sites believe that if they permit 9/11 to be questioned, it would brand them as “terrorist sympathizers” and discredit their opposition to the war. An exception is Information Clearing House.
Antiwar sites do not realize that, by accepting the 9/11 explanation, they have undermined their own opposition to the war. Once you accept that Muslim terrorists did it, it is difficult to oppose punishing them for the event. In recent months, important antiwar sites, such as antiwar.com, have had difficulty with their fundraising, with their fundraising campaigns going on far longer than previously. They do not understand that if you grant the government its premise for war, it is impossible to oppose the war.
As far as I can tell, most Americans have far greater confidence in the government than they do in the truth. During the Great Depression the liberals with their New Deal succeeded in teaching Americans to trust the government as their protector. This took with the left and the right. Neither end of the political spectrum is capable of fundamental questioning of the government. This explains the ease with which our government routinely deceives the people.
Democracy is based on the assumption that people are rational beings who factually examine arguments and are not easily manipulated. Studies are not finding this to be the case. In my own experience in scholarship, public policy, and journalism, I have learned that everyone from professors to high school dropouts has difficulty with facts and analyses that do not fit with what they already believe. The notion that “we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead” is an extremely romantic and idealistic notion. I have seldom experienced open minds even in academic discourse or in the highest levels of government. Among the public at large, the ability to follow the truth wherever it may lead is almost non-existent.
The US government’s response to 9/11, regardless of who is responsible, has altered our country forever. Our civil liberties will never again be as safe as they were. America’s financial capability and living standards are forever lower. Our country’s prestige and world leadership are forever damaged. The first decade of the 21st century has been squandered in pointless wars, and it appears the second decade will also be squandered in the same pointless and bankrupting pursuit.
The most disturbing fact of all remains: The 9/11 event responsible for these adverse happenings has not been investigated.
In the last few days Glenn Beck and the Washington Times have forced Van Jones to resign as environmentalist “green jobs” adviser to the White House. His principal offense: having signed a 2004 Statement from 911truth.org calling for a new investigation of the events of 9/11.
This is a moment of truth for all who want America to be an open society. As the Los Angeles Times reported on September 8, “Other conservatives, smelling blood in the water, are sharpening their knives.” Why should they not? The White House has just capitulated to a dishonest attack claiming that Jones, because he signed the 911truth Statement, “thinks the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Centers and covered it up.” You can check Beck’s capacity for accuracy by comparing this claim to the relevant call in the Statement itself: “for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
Supporting Beck are authors like Charles Krauthammer, arguing that “truthers” – those of us who signed the 911truth statement — are creating “a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.”
In the wake of these attacks, three of the original hundred signers — Van Jones, the environmentalist Paul Hawken and Jodie Evans of Code Pink — have asked that their signatures on the 911truth Statement be removed. I am hoping that numbers of other responsible community leaders will stem this flight from rational inquiry by coming forward to sign the statement at this time.
In fact, nine such individuals have done so already at Salon.com. In “Would you still sign the 9/11 Truth petition?”, reporter Vincent Rossmeier contacted 30 of the original signatories and asked, simply, “If you had to do it all over again, would you still sign the statement?” Of the responses published, all but two “expressed their full-fledged support for the petition.” Several of these people not only reaffirmed their endorsement of the statement, but went on to put forward clear arguments supported by overwhelming facts as to why they now do so.
I am one of the university professors who signed the Statement. One of the many reasons I did so was because of my awareness that Vice-President Cheney had given two conflicting accounts as to whether he was in the White House bunker in precisely the crucial minutes when the most important orders of that day (including the institution of so-called “Continuity of Government” measures which continue to this day) were issued from that place. I discuss this in my book The Road to 9/11 (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 200-03, 228-30, of which the following draft excerpt is available on the Internet:
Cheney himself told Tim Russert of “Meet the Press” on September 16, 2001, in an interview still available five years later on the White House website, that he arrived in the PEOC before the Pentagon was hit, i.e. before 9:37 AM.15 But the 9/11 Report follows a later and very different account in Newsweek, based on an interview with Cheney, which now had him leave his office at 9:35 and arrive in the PEOC “shortly before 10 a.m.” We shall see that new evidence, which only surfaced in 2006, corroborates Cheney’s first story, and makes his revised time-table extremely unlikely. Clearly one of Cheney’s two accounts of his arrival (before 9:37, and around 9:58) must be wrong. Moreover what is at stake is not trivial. Important orders were issued in this hour from the PEOC: one alleged order (whose content is uncertain) which Mineta claims to have heard about 9:30, a second order to ground all planes at about 9:45, and a third tripartite order (which according to Clarke included a shoot-down order) at about 9:50. By Mineta’s account, corroborated by Clarke, Cheney had arrived in the PEOC in time to give all three of these orders; by Cheney’s second account, he arrived after all three were given.
The case for a new investigation of 9/11 is now far stronger than it was in 2004, because even those responsible for the 9/11 Commission inquiry have since complained that it was flawed. The two co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, noted in their book, Without Precedent, that they were given insufficient time and “a dramatically insufficient [initial] budget of $3 million.” Later they wrote in the New York Times (January 2, 2008) that the CIA “failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. [and] obstructed our investigation.”
The Washington Post (August 2, 2006) has reported that “Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission.”
Louis Freeh, FBI Director at the time, has written that
“Even the most junior investigator would immediately know that the name and photo ID of [lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed] Atta in 2000 is precisely the kind of tactical intelligence the FBI has many times employed to prevent attacks and arrest terrorists. Yet the 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it ‘was not historically significant.’ This astounding conclusion–in combination with the failure to investigate Able Danger and incorporate it into its findings–raises serious challenges to the commission’s credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself. No wonder the 9/11 families were outraged by these revelations and called for a ‘new’ commission” (Wall Street Journal 11/17/05)
And Rutgers Law School-Newark Dean John Farmer, Senior Counsel and Team Leader to the 9/11 Commission states in his newly released book, The Ground Truth,
“At some level of government,at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11. We owe the truth to the families of the victims of 9/11. We owe it to the American public as well, because only by understanding what has gone wrong in the past can we assure our nation’s safety in the future.”
In addition to these community leaders’ signatures, 40 family members of 9/11 victims signed the 2004 Truth Statement. The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission submitted hundreds of questions to the 9/11 Commission as it began its investigation. Although Commissioner Jamie Gorelick told the family members their questions would be used as a “road map” for the investigation, the Family Steering Committee’s report, “FSC Questions to the 9/11 Commission with Ratings of its Performance in Providing Answers” found the overwhelming majority of questions were not only left unanswered but were not even addressed in the final 9/11 Commission Report.
I appeal to readers to help ensure that the doubters of the official 9/11 story will not be bullied into silence.
The real issue is to defeat the campaign of media hitmen to punish people who want to know the truth about their country. If you agree, please go to www.911truth.org to read the 2009 Truth Statement and add your name to the voices of those who have signed the 2004 Statement.
9/11 truth protests fill New York on the 8th anniversary of the worst tragedy in America’s modern history. RT’s Anastasia Churkina follows the hundreds of people who are still not getting the answers they want.
Prior to the eighth anniversary of 9/11, researchers at Trend Micro, an anti-virus software company, warned on their blog that Google searches of the term “September 11″ lead to “rogue AV malware.” Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner’s knowing it. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, rootkits, spyware, misleading adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software.
As with most malware, the perpetrators behind the TROJ_FAKEAV.BOH virus are unknown. The obvious question is who stands to gain from this exploit? If the creators of this particular malware wanted to spread their virus far and wide, they would likely use a more popular search term — for instance the name of a celebrity or popular television show.
Excuse my paranoia, but the obvious culprit here is the government, not a band of rogue hackers and virus programmers. The government — in league with the Mockingbird corporate media — have turned somersaults in a tireless effort to debunk and discredit the 9/11 truth movement and derail any attempt to initiated a new and independent investigation. “The people behind FAKEAV still show no sign of slowing down,” writes Jessa De La Torre, threat response engineer for Trend Micro — and they won’t until they scare everybody away from investigating 9/11.
Rumsfeld’s Pentagon unleashed a “shadow war” of covert special-forces computer and internet operations soon after 9/11. “But unlike rebellious teenagers sitting at their bedroom computers, these hackers work for intelligence agencies and have advanced training in computer science, math and cryptology,” the Montreal Gazette reported in October, 2001. More recently, General Dynamics Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., CACI International Inc., Northrop Grumman Corp., and Raytheon Co. competed for “cyber warfare contracts as the Obama administration prepares to spend billions to obtain cyber warfare capabilities to outperform the Chinese and Russians,” according to Washington Technology.
Free exchange of information, according to the Pentagon, is a threat. “The Pentagon’s Information Operations Roadmap is blunt about the fact that an internet, with the potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy ‘weapons system,’” writes Brent Jessop. “It should come as no surprise that the Pentagon would aggressively attack the ‘information highway’ in their attempt to achieve dominance in information warfare. Donald Rumsfeld’s involvement in the Project for a New American Century sheds more light on the need and desire to control information.” The PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, states: “It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies… are creating a dynamic that may threaten America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power.”
Last year, according to Wired, the U.S. Special Operations Command suggested “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers” to fight against the enemy. The 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy,” suggested co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning wrote.
The effort was a follow-up to a Pentagon program that worked “with a carefully culled list of military analysts, bloggers, and others who can be counted on to parrot the Bush Administration’s line on national security issues,” Ken Silverstein wrote for Harpers.
Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security actively recruited hackers who “think like the bad guy,” National Terror Alert reported.
Considering the above, it is not a stretch to conclude that the Pentagon would infect 9/11 searches with malware. Once again, cui bono –the principle that probable responsibility for an act or event lies with one having something to gain — comes into play.
PortalScape 