Five Years Later, 911 Questions Remain
Did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot JFK? Or was he part of a conspiracy involving organized crime, Castro, LBJ, and/or the FBI? We may never know, but 40 years later a large portion of a skeptical public refuses to believe the official "lone nut assassin" and "magic bullet" theories advanced by the government in the Warren Commission Report. Dozens of books and almost as many movies have kept these questions alive and often angrily debated for decades.
Was 911 a terrorist attack, or an inside job, designed to take us to war? A generation later, a growing number of Americans have new questions - this time about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the reasons behind our likely entry into World War 3. This, in spite of a flood of high-priced white house spin working hard to dissuade them. But they're not going away.
A poll by the Pew Research Organization found that half (49.3%) of New Yorkers believe that our leaders had foreknowledge of impending 911 attacks and "consciously failed" to act. And a recent Zogby International poll shows 66% calling for a new probe of unanswered questions by Congress or New York's attorney general. It should also be noted that while it's results are not scientific, 84% of respondents to a CNN poll believe that the government is hiding the truth about the attacks on the pentagon and the WTC. And now it's the self-described 9-11 truth movement that's not going away. Is 911 this generation's Pearl Harbor? Or are the World Trade Center and the Pentagon our grassy knoll? 911 "truthers" want to know.
They quote Marshall McLuhan: "Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity."
It began in France. Following the attacks of 911, the mainstream magazine LaMonde (think Life Magazine, but French) published an article titled "Hunt the Boeing." It displayed satellite photos of the Pentagon taken after it was hit on 911, showing no crashed airplane and no scorched lawn, just a 16 ft hole in an outer wall of the building, and asked readers to find the airliner. A 757 has a 45 ft wingspan and its tail is 44 ft high. Others were quick to note that given its flight plan, the 757 would also have been full of jet fuel. Where was the environmental cleanup? they asked. Still others examined the aerial acrobatics of the plane and argued the supposed hijackers were incapable of the required maneuvers. Some could barely fly at all, according to their flight instructors.
It heated up with "Loose Change", the most downloaded movie in the history of the internet. (www.loosechange911.com) Written and Directed by Oneonta NY film student Dylan Avery, it examines the attacks of 911 and includes film evidence of what Avery found to be domestic involvement and complicity, including footage of independent explosives in the Twin Towers detonating a dozen stories below the fire line. Interestingly enough, Avery had set out to produce a work of fiction about a conspiracy behind the WTC and Pentagon attacks, but the more research he did, the more factual his scenario appeared.
Avery also challenged the now almost legendary story of Flight 93, and of the brave actions of Scott Beamer and his crew. He documents that cell phones didn't work on airliners at cruising altitude in 2001 - no functioning prototype existed until 2004, which means, he says, that those calls were faked, if they happened at all. Of course, the film has its critics, but to his credit Avery does not claim Loose Change is the last word on the subject. He has never claimed to have all the answers, just lots of questions, and has already updated his movie once to address various challenges.
It exploded with Charlie Sheen. Sheen found the evidence compelling. Alex Jones is a talk radio show host out of Austin, Texas and owner of infowars.com, a site devoted to alternative news and commentary. Jones often deals with Constitutional rights, and the advance of globalism, and had previously researched Waco and Oklahoma City and challenged Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, for overlooking what he believes were deliberate acts and omissions, designed to facilitate the attacks. Jones insists they were not acts of incompetence, as Moore's film suggests.
Jones' latest documentary, Terrorstorm, traces the world history of false flag terrorism. Does Alex Jones know what he's talking about? Just maybe. In April 2001, sixth months before 911, he announced that the Bush administration was going to provoke war in the Mideast, and lay the blame on a CIA asset. He named Osama Bin Laden.
Appearing on The Alex Jones Radio show, Charlie Sheen revealed publicly that he didn't believe the official version of events, he'd had been researching 911, reading books and watching videos, including one titled Loose Change." “It seems to me,” said Sheen, “like 19 amateurs with box cutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75% of their targets? that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions." He speculated about a controlled demolition on CNN Entertainment Tonight, and then again on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and skeptics say he may have paid a price for his openness - shortly afterward, he was denounced by his ex-wife as an internet porn addict and crucified in the media.
The government hasn't exactly been helping its case. After initially refusing to investigate the events of 911, families of 911 victims forced it to action. A commission was established by an administration which had suppressed information and punished whistle blowers. In the Spring of 2004, FBI agent Sibel Edmonds exposed the bureau's translation department's rampant negligence, corruption, and possession of early warnings of the 9/11 attacks. She was fired, gagged by Attorney General John Ashcroft and dismissed by the 911 Commission. Then, in 2006, after years of claiming there was no film footage of the attack on the Pentagon, and amid reports they'd confiscated security tapes from nearby businesses, the government in May released 5 frames of blurred, non-distinct video that even the pundits at Foxnews conceded was fuel for the conspiracy-minded. 911 Researchers say there may be as many as 84 videotapes of the Pentagon attack.
The Bush-appointed World Trade Center Commission investigated, and the official version of events was echoed - 19 hijackers, planes took down the towers, end of story. But Fire Engineering Magazine, the century-old bible of the firefighting industry, criticized the WTC report, its author claiming that "no steel building has ever been destroyed by fire" and calling the Commission a "half-baked farce." And Kevin Ryan, site manager of the Environmental Health Laboratories for Underwriters Laboratories, which insured the WTC, was fired for challenging the official version of events.
Family matters. With more people asking questions, Hearst-owned Popular Mechanics Magazine published an article titled "Debunking 9/11Lies" designed to silence critics and prove that the jet fuel fires (kerosene) brought down the twin towers. But truthers discovered that the article was written by none other than Benjamin Chertoff, cousin to Michael Chertoff, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They also learned that overseeing security in the upper floors of the Twin Towers, where demolitions would have had to have been placed, was none other than Marvin Bush, the president's brother.
There are many "smoking guns" of 911. One website lists 200 points of interest. But many in the 911 community feel the key to uncovering the truth of 911 may prove to be World Trade Center Building 7, located across from the Twin Towers, and a football field away. They point out that It was hit by no plane, but fell anyway, in its own footprint, and like the Twin Towers, in a manner resembling controlled demolition. They point to the Report of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which concluded that the collapse of Building 7 "remains a mystery."
They also are quick to point a finger at Larry Silverstein, billionaire leaseholder of the WTC. “I remember,” said Mr. Silverstein in the 2002 PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, “getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.” Is this proof that the towers were demolished? Silverstein, who had put up just $14 million of his own money in a deal worth $3.5 billion, collected over five billion dollars in insurance money, with the extra billions made on a "terrorism clause."
Others point to the Pentagon, arguing that photographs and the laws of physics are inconsistent with an untrained pilot in a 757 hitting the building. They ask how it is that 35 minutes after the second tower was hit, and a multi-pronged attack was clearly underway, a commercial airliner was able to evade our trillion dollar defense system to reach and strike the Pentagon. They point to testimony by former White House Chief of Staff Leon Minetta before the 911 Commission - that at the time of the attack on the Pentagon, he was in a bunker with Vice President Cheney, who, in the face of urgent reports of an aircraft approaching the Pentagon, refused to lift stand-down orders. They scream "inside job."
Attacking the official version of events has its risks, according to Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. She had been the leading critic of the Bush policy on Iraq, and openly questioned Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq and 911. Most Americans first heard about her when she was tackled by a security guard on her way to the House floor. Like Charlie Sheen, she was quickly set upon by the media.
But truthers claim to have history on their side. They cite other examples of "False Flag" terrorism, from the attack on the Maine by our own forces, staged to speed our entry into the Spanish American War, to the attack on the USS Liberty during the first Iraq war, carried out by our Israeli allies to blame on Egypt, allowing us involvement into that conflict. (Students of Vietnam cite the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which President Johnson lied about attacks on US ships to drag us into Vietnam.) "This is how nations have always gone to war," says Alex Jones. "You shoot yourself in the foot, blame an unseen enemy, and you have the people behind you. Like when Nero burned Rome, to blame the Christians. Or when Hitler burned the Reichstag as a pretense to attack the communists." So was 911 a self-inflicted wound?
The lessons of history haven't been ignored, they've been exploited, says Jones. While President Eisenhower, in his parting speech, had warned of the dangers of misplaced power and the rise of what he called the "military industrial complex", the neocon Project for a New American Century, whose members include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Forbes, Lewis "Scooter" Libby," and Jeb Bush called for the military reformation of America. As PNAC member and frequent Foxnews commentator Bill Crystal wrote almost ten years ago, "...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." Is 911 their Pearl Harbor?
911 "truthers" ask how the murders of 3000 people could go uninvestigated. They have so far been largely dismissed. But momentum may be building. Scholars for 911 Truth is an organization of academics and researchers who question the official version of events. At their American Scholars Symposium this summer, covered by the New York Times, featured on C-SPAN, Charlie Sheen addressed an audience of several hundred scientists, researchers and 911 truthers. "We are here today to ask those who are still sleeping to wake up and join us. We are here today to fire a warning shot across the bow of mainstream media - to remind them of their original responsibility as civil and political watchdogs."
notable skeptics, some of whom were in attendance:
Dr. Robert Bowman Lt. Col., USAF, ret. is President of the Institute for Space and Security Studies, Executive Vice President of Millennium III Corporation, and retired Presiding Archbishop of the United Catholic Church. He flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam and directed all the "Star Wars" programs under Presidents Ford and Carter. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President's Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers' ROTC Award of Merit (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His PhD. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech, he has chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country's foremost experts on National Security. And he just won the Democratic primary for Florida's 15th congressional district. He claims 911 was an inside job, and easy to see, and that the stand-down orders came from high up (where were those interceptor planes?). His primary suspect in enabling the attacks is Vice President Cheney.
Morgan Reynolds was George W. Bush's first term Chief Economist of the Dept of Labor, is former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. On the WTC, he claims "only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."
Bill Christison is a former senior official of the CIA. He was a National Intelligence Officer and the Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He now believes that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the "official story" put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false.
Dr. Steven Jones, physics professor at Brigham Young University, author of the peer-reviewed treatise "Why Indeed did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" insists that the near free-fall speed of the towers' collapse (8.4 seconds) would not have been possible without planted explosives in the towers, and had the floors "pancaked" one on the other as the government insists, He also claims that molten steel in the basements of the WTC three weeks after 911 prove the use of thermate - a combination of plastic explosive and incendiary materials. Thermate burns at extremely high temperatures, creates oxygen, and thus can't be extinguished.
Andreas Von Bulow is the former minister of technology and the former head of the German secret service. He has publicly rejected the official theories of 911, claiming an inside conspiracy and CIA involvement.
David Ray Griffin is a University of Wisconsin professor, one of the most respected theologians in the US, and author of The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions
Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under president Reagan, also went public, saying "I know many qualified engineers and scientists have said the WTC collapsed from explosives. In fact, if you look at the manner in which it fell, you have to give their conclusions credibility."
40 years after the Warren Commission Report, we're still not sure what happened to JFK, but most Americans reject the official story. In forty years, how will we see 911?
CNN's Lou Dobbs has called for a reopening of the 911 investigation. So has former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, who has publicly questioned the lack of scrambled interceptor planes on 911. Of course, if you don't believe any of it - you're not alone. But odds are you can't prove it, either. New York City truther Jimmy Walters has offered a million dollars to anyone who can prove that the Twin Towers were NOT taken down by explosives. So far, no one can.
LATE NEWS: Bush attacks 911 truthers - In a just released document "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, we read: (terrorism springs from) "subcultures of conspiracy and misinformation." "Terrorists recruit more effectively from populations whose information about the world is contaminated by falsehoods and corrupted by conspiracy theories. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda." Has the president declared a secret war against his pursuers?
LATE NEWS: On September 18, 2001, perhaps to speed the reopening of Wall Street, President Bush had Christie Todd Whitman assure New Yorkers that ground zero was safe, and told them to return to work. But just this month, New Yorkers learned that 70% of the workers at ground zero suffered lung damage in the aftermath of the WTC attacks. To the truthers, this is one more reason to doubt the official version of events.