'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 5 of 10): One, Two World Trade Center

Aircraft collision, and the resulting fire, did not cause the twin towers to collapse — "NIST has stated that it did not analyze the collapse of the towers."

Two World Trade Center, the South Tower, collapsed at 9:59 a.m. One World Trade Center, the North Tower, collapsed at 10:28 a.m. At 10:03 a.m., CNN reported: “THIRD EXPLOSION SHATTERS WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”. At 10:06 a.m., CNN reported: “THIRD EXPLOSION COLLAPSES WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK”.

According to U.S. government reports, aircraft impact would not have caused the Twin Towers to collapse.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. government agency responsible for analyzing the collapse of the Twin Towers, included a memo dated February 3, 1964 in Appendix A of their report Baseline Structural Performance and Aircraft Impact Damage Analysis of the World Trade Center Towers (April 26, 2006) that states:

The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result only in local damage which would not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.

The memo further states:

The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure.

Executive Summary, Table E-8 of the NIST report estimates aircraft impact speeds at 443 mph plus or minus 30 for AA 11 (WTC 1), and 542 mph plus or minus 24 for UAL 175 (WTC 2).

The Boeing 767s that hit the North and South Towers were slightly heavier than a Boeing 707-. Calculations show that they would have caused less damage than the Boeing 707 travelling at 600 mph in Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson’s structural analysis (Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, p146).

Executive Summary, Finding 18 states: “the tower still had reserve capacity after losing a number of columns and floor segments due to aircraft impact.”

Despite the preceding statements, in an August 30, 2006 Fact Sheet, NIST stated:

NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers.”

NIST’s evidence and conclusions are challenged by other experts, and NIST appears to concede to their criticism.

Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering at MIT, who contributed to the official account of 9/11 says the impact of the airplanes would not have been significant.

Kevin Ryan, a division director who was terminated by Underwriters Laboratories for challenging the NIST analysis, wrote:

Of course, those of us who have actually followed NIST’s investigation know that they could not produce any ‘robust criteria’ to establish that fireproofing was lost through forces of vibration. Instead, NIST performed a shotgun test to see if the fireproofing could have been lost through shearing forces.

The shotgun test not only failed to support NIST’s predetermined conclusions, as was the case for all of their other physical tests, but it actually proved that the fireproofing could not have been sheared off because too much energy would be needed.

The Twin Towers had 240 perimeter columns, and 47 massive, box columns in the core. NIST’s damage assessment for the towers was as follows (Griffin, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, p146):

North Tower: 35 exterior columns severed, 2 heavily damaged; 6 core columns severed, 3 heavily damaged; 43 of 47 core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors.

South Tower: 33 exterior columns severed, 1 heavily damaged; 10 core columns severed, 1 heavily damaged; 39 of 47 core columns stripped of insulation on one or more floors.

Engineering News-Record explained in 1964:

one could cut away all the first story columns on one side of the building, and part way from the corners of the perpendicular sides, and the building could still withstand design live loads, and a 100 mph wind force from any direction.

To make the Commission’s theory appear plausible, The 9/11 Commission Report claims (541), falsely, that the core of the towers “was a hollow steel shaft.”

In response to an April 12, 2007 “Request for Correction,” NIST’s Catherine S. Fletcher, Chief, Management and Organization Division, appears to concede—at least partially—to the critics.

In her letter dated September 27, 2007, she states:

NIST Computer Simulations: NIST has used an extensive database of photographic and video evidence to validate the models used to analyze the behavior of the towers up to the point of initiation of collapse. . . .

The WTC Steel Temperature: While NIST did not find evidence that any of the recovered core columns experienced temperatures in excess of 250° C, it is not possible to extrapolate from such a small sample size to state that none of the core columns on the fire affected floors reached temperatures in excess of 250° C. . . .

The Goal of the WTC Report and Its Overall Analysis: NIST has stated that it did not analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. . . . we were unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.

NIST’s analysis ends with the “initiation of collapse.” NIST admits that “it did not analyze the collapse of the towers.”

In room fires (Dr. Vytenis Babrauskas, 2006)

the maximum value which is fairly regularly found . . . turns out to be around 1200°C, although a typical post-flashover room fire will more commonly be 900~1000°C. The time-temperature curve for the standard fire endurance test, ASTM E 119 goes up to 1260°C, but this is reached only in 8 hr.

NIST also admits that physical evidence does not support their conclusion of fire temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. In the samples taken from the site, there’s no evidence that any core column experienced temperatures in excess of 250° C.

Since steel loses 50% strength at 650° C, and melts at 1500° C, if one were to assume—for the sake of argument only—that the fire was large enough, the fire was neither hot enough, nor long-lasting enough (major fires lasted less than15 minutes), to significantly weaken the towers.

Richard Gage, founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth—with 400-plus members, makes the following points regarding the NIST report:

The destruction occurred with rapid onset, at virtually free-fall speed, and with radial symmetry.

One hundred eighteen first responders described hearing, seeing and feeling explosions and seeing flashes of light at the onset of destruction.

The concrete floors were almost completely pulverized into dust and gravel.

The structural steel framework was largely dismembered into shippable lengths. Much of it was hurled outside the Twin Towers’ perimeters, some as far as 500 feet away.

Tons of molten metal were seen by FDNY and others, and was described as “flowing like lava” for weeks after 9/11, yet its existence was denied by NIST.

Proven chemical evidence of thermate, an incendiary material which produces molten iron as its by-product, found on the columns and beams, previously molten metal, and iron-rich micro-spheres in the dust by Dr. Steven Jones (and corroborated by the U.S. Geological Survey, but never explained).

“These features are characteristic of controlled demolitions, and not office or jet fuel fires”, writes Gage.

And explosions were reported on television news.

MSNBC Reporter: At 10:30 I tried to leave the building, but as soon as I got outside, I saw [sic] the second explosion, an another rumble, and more dust. I ran inside the building . . . and then a fire marshall came in and said we had to leave because if there was a third explosion this building might not last.

CBS Channel 2 Reporter: New York’s bravest never had a chance.

Firefighter on CBS Channel 2: We never got that close to the building. The explosion blew, and it knocked everybody over.

Fox News Reporter: The FBI is here as you can see . . . they were taking photographs and securing this area just prior to that huge explosion that we all heard and felt.

NBC Reporter: Most of the victims so far were outside the blownup building.

Witness on NBC: It sounded like gunfire—bang, bang, bang, bang. Then all of a sudden three big explosions.

Among those who testified to explosions at the 9/11 Commission hearings was William Rodriguez, “honored by the White House” for his rescue efforts.

Since the force exerted by the impact of the aircraft was within the Twin Towers’ design criteria, and the fires were neither hot enough, large enough, nor long-lasting enough to have caused the collapse, there had to have been another source of energy to cause collapse.

Leslie Robertson, structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center, is reported to have said at the National Conference of Structural Engineers on October 5, 2001: “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning, and molten steel was still running.”

In their investigation, both the 9/11 Commission and NIST, ignored testimony and evidence not consistent with their collapse theory.

NIST says (FAQ, August 30, 2006):

The condition of the steel in the wreckage of the WTC towers (i.e., whether it was in a molten state or not) was irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.

The molten steel may not provide “any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing”, but it is very relevant to the evaluation of hypotheses of why the towers collapsed. The steel at the bottom of the debris pile did not spontaneously get hot and melt after collapse.

NIST did not evaluate the use of explosives.

NIST rejects the “pancake theory” for the collapse (August 30, 2006 Fact Sheet) popular in some circles, but NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder contradicts NIST.

Sunder says that the squibs (puffs or jets of smoke and dust caused by the detonation of explosives) seen in videos of the collapse are caused by the “floor pancaking” (Popular Mechanics, March 2007).

In September 2006, Mete Sozen and Christoph M. Hoffmann, professors at Purdue University, claimed to have an answer.

Sozen and Hoffman concluded that

the weight of the fuel acted like a flash flood of flaming liquid, knocking out essential structural columns within the building and removing fireproofing insulation from other support structures.

These researchers simulated the “top 20 stories” for “3/4 seconds real-time”. Their simulation, like NIST’s, says nothing about the collapse itself—it stops at the initiation of collapse.

By extrapolation, a simulation of the 102 real-time minutes from impact to collapse—which would have to make many arguable assumptions—could take 652,800 hours or about 75 years.

Even though the “criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis. FEMA had steel recovered from the building rubble destroyed or shipped” to India and China before it could be examined for traces of explosives (sourcewatch.org).

A paper by Niels H. Harrit and others (The Open Chemical Physics Journal) has confirmed the presence of thermitic material in dust samples from the WTC.

'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 4 of 10): The 'Hijackers'

There are no Arab names on the published passenger lists

On September 12, 2001 ABC News reported that “investigators have identified all the hijackers”.
Among those identified was “Satam Suqami, a Saudi national on American Airlines Flight 11, whose passport was [miraculously] recovered in the rubble.”

The next day, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller announced that the FBI had “identified most of the hijackers responsible”. Mueller is reported to have said (CBS, 60 Minutes II, September 10, 2003):

A flight attendant on American Flight 11, Amy Sweeney, had the presence of mind to call her office as the plane was hijacked and give them the seat numbers of the hijackers.

Peter Finn and Charles Lane wrote that an attendant on Flight 11 used a cell phone (Washington Post, October 6, 2001), but six years later, the FBI admitted that two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were the only cell phone calls made from all four of the 9/11 planes (Griffin, Canadian, October 8, 2007).

If an Airfone was used, billing records could provide confirmation of Sweeney’s phone call.

On September 21, 2001, Nick Hopkins of the Guardian reported:

After analysis of the passenger lists of the four hijacked flights and other immigration documents, investigators identified Salem Al-Hazmi and Abdulaziz Al-Omari as two of the terrorists.
The real Salem Al-Hazmi, however, is alive and indignant in Saudi Arabia, and not one of the people who perished in the American Airlines flight that crashed on the Pentagon.

On September 23, 2001 BBC News reported that four of the hijack “suspects”—Waleed Al Shehri, Abdulaziz Al Omari, Saeed Alghamdi, and possibly Khalid Al Midhar were—alive, and Director Mueller acknowledged “that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.”

The same day, David Harrison of the Telegraph reported:

The men—all from Saudi Arabia—spoke of their shock at being mistakenly named by the FBI as suicide terrorists. None of the four was in the United States on September 11 and all are alive in their home country.

On September 17, 2001, the Associated Press published passenger lists for AA Flight 11, UA Flight 175, AA Flight 77, and UA Flight 93, based on information supplied by “family members, friends, co-workers and law enforcement”—the same list appears on CNN and the websites of several other news organizations.

There were no Arab names on these lists!

The “terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta”—identified by a suitcase and will allegedly left behind at Boston airport (Peter Finn, Washington Post, October 6, 2001)—was not listed on the passenger list for American Airlines Flight 11.

Hani Hanjour’s “name was not on the American Airlines manifest for the flight because he may not have had a ticket” according to the Washington Post. How then did he get on the flight?

The passenger lists published by the Associated Press, USA Today, and others note that these are, “Partial lists of passengers and crew killed in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, according to family members, friends, coworkers and local law enforcement.”

“This is a very strange way to source such information,” said Gerard Holmgren. He asks,

Why not get it from American Airlines or the FBI? If neither of these were consulted, how did USAT know who’s “family members, friends, co-workers” to go looking for? Or if AA and the FBI were the first source of inquiry, why a partial list from hearsay sources?

Gary North, an historian, also expressed concern:

How did the airlines know how many people were on each of these flights? The airlines must have had a list for each flight. What possible reason could they have had for not releasing the full lists?

On April 19, 2002, Mueller said in speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco,

In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.

In July of 2006, in connection with the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui—the “20th hijacker,” the U.S. government published documents containing the names of the alleged hijackers, and aircraft layouts showing the seats occupied by the hijackers.

The 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004, left unresolved the discrepancies in the passenger lists.

Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer wrote (Washington Post, March 21, 2006):

An FBI agent who interrogated Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, 2001, warned his supervisors more than 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist and spelled out his suspicions that the al-Qaeda operative was plotting to hijack an airplane, according to federal court testimony yesterday.

Lawyers for Moussaoui who pleaded guilty, and is the only person criminally charged by the U.S. with participating in 9/11, allege that the government knew more about the conspiracy than did the defendant (CNN, February 2, 2006).

'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 3 of 10): Bin Laden

No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11—FBI

Bin Laden is the “prime suspect” in the September 11 attacks, said President Bush on September 17, 2001, and pledged to capture him “dead or alive.”

Bin Laden, in a September 28, 2001 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, is reported to have said:

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.

Experts dismiss the video tape “discovered in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan” which allegedly shows Bin Laden confessing to the September 11 attacks (NPR, September 13, 2001)—another lucky find, like the passports in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and at the Flight 93 “crash site.”

In a December 20, 2001 broadcast by German TV channel Das Erste “two independent translators and an expert on oriental studies found the White House’s translation not only to be inaccurate, but manipulative.”

In a radio interview with Kevin Barrett, Prof. Bruce Lawrence, editor of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, called the video “bogus.”

As of July 2008, the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists web page makes no reference to Bin Laden being wanted for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI states:

Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.

When asked why is there no mention of 9/11 on the FBI’s web page, Rex Tomb, the FBI’s Chief of Investigative Publicity, is reported to have said, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

In the months leading up to September 11, 2001, the Taliban “outlined various ways bin Laden could be dealt with. He could be turned over to the EU, killed by the Taliban, or made available as a target for Cruise missiles” (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch, November 1, 2004).

On September 20, 2001 the Taliban “offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic country for trial if the US presented them with evidence” that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The US rejected the offer (George Monbiot, Guardian, November 11 2003).

“The Bush administration said yesterday,” reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (September 24, 2001), “that it would release evidence that Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden masterminded the attacks” on 9/11.

I am absolutely convinced that the al-Qaida network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Powell said the government would “put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case that ... it is al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, who has been responsible.

The Bush administration’s case, Powell’s case, has yet to be “put before the world”.

On March 29, 2006, on The Tony Snow Show, Vice President Dick Cheney stated: “So we’ve never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow Osama Bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming.”

On September 11, 2001, several military exercises were taking place: Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian, Northern Vigilance. What role, if any, these played on 9/11 has not been explained.

'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 2 of 10): Pretexts and Coverups

A brief review of pretexts, deceptions, and cover-ups may be useful in understanding how the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress, and a compliant media misled Americans, and got them to acquiesce in the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suez Canal

Britain and France had their plan for taking back the Suez Canal after it was nationalized by President Nasser of Egypt on July 26, 1956. “France secretly enlisted the help of Israel,” writes James Bamford—former Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings (Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, 2001).

The intrigue involved Israel launching a war against Egypt. Then, once Egypt began defending itself, England and France would go in as “peacekeepers.” As part of the “peace,” the canal would be taken from Egypt and kept by Britain and France. Israel would capture the Sinai from Egypt.

The plan was agreed to by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, defense minister Shimon Peres, armed forces chief Moshe Dayan, and Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

USS Liberty

While falsely blaming “enemies,” the U.S. government, and America’s “free press,” have sacrificed Americans in order to cover-up for “friends.”

On June 8, 1967, a U.S. Navy intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, was attacked in international waters by Israel’s air and naval forces. (USS Liberty Memorial website—http://www.gtr5.com/).

USS Liberty was identified as a US naval ship nine hours before the attack by Israeli reconnaissance aircraft and continuously tracked by Israeli radar and aircraft thereafter. Sailing in international waters at less than five knots, with no offensive armament, [the] ship was not a military threat to anyone.

Thirty four Americans were killed in the attack and another 174 were wounded.

For 40 years, survivors of the USS Liberty have been forbidden “to tell their story under oath to the American public.” The cover-up of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, begun under the Johnson administration, continues to this day.

What have successive U.S. administrations been covering up?

On the morning of June 8, the USS Liberty, sailing a few miles off El Arish in Israel, was secretly listening in on the Israelis who were then attacking Arab air bases from Damascus in Syria to Luxor in Egypt. The Israelis had occupied the Jordanian section of Jerusalem, and captured Sharm al-Sheikh.

And while the USS Liberty eavesdropped (Bamford, Body of Secrets):

a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army’s own historian. . . .

At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression . . . Israel’s commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post.

The pattern set in 1967—covering up for Israeli aggression, has been a major contributor to U.S. problems in the Middle East.

Cuba

Following the failed, Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961, by 1,300 members of a CIA-supported counterrevolutionary Cuban exile force, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) drew up and approved plans for “launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.”

Bamford writes:

Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan . . . called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chairman JCS] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

Accidents, writes Bamford, were to be used to advance U.S. interests. Had the February 20, 1962 launch of John Glenn—the first American to orbit the earth, later a U.S. presidential candidate—not been successful, the JCS were prepared to use John Glenn’s possible death as a pretext for war.

The flight was to carry the banner of America’s virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale [U.S. general in charge of Operation Mongoose—covert operations against Cuba] that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic].” This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”

In 1963, writes Bamford, the JCS proposed secret U.S. attacks on Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago.

Both were members of the British Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then falsely blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war against Castro.

Vietnam

On August 5, 1964, President Johnson announced retaliatory attacks on Vietnamese targets alleging that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had attacked two American destroyers on routine patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin—the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy.

The Maddox was in fact gathering intelligence for coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, July 27, 1994).

In 2005, an NSA declassified report revealed that the USS Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may not have been any North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident (R. J. Hanyok, Cryptologic Quarterly, February 24, 1998).

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
The Viet Nam war led to 58,217 American deaths, and as many as two million Vietnamese casualties.

Diego Garcia

John Pilger’s documentary, “Stealing a Nation,” describes how in the 1960s, as Britain was dismantling its colonies, the U.S. conspired with Britain to receive secretly, gratis, and for 50 years, the Chagos Archipelago.

Between 1965 and 1973, to clear the largest island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, for a listening post for the U.S. National Security Administration, every man, woman, and child was physically removed from the islands, and placed “bewildered and frightened,” on the islands of Mauritius and Seychelles.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the “sanitizing,” ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. . . .

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase.

Recently, David Vine revealed (Foreign Policy in Focus, April 3, 2008) that this

huge U.S. air and naval base has been a major, if little known, launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .The island has also been part of the CIA’s secret ‘rendition’ program for captured terrorist suspects.

Iraq

Dr. George Friedman, founder of Stratfor—dubbed by Barron’s as “The Shadow CIA,” wrote in America’s Secret War that the United States “had supported the Shah’s Iran in a war against Iraq in the 1970s,” but after the Iranian revolution, “the Americans were looking for a lever to control Iran”.

Friedman added:

The Carter administration wanted to motivate Saddam to fight, but he had little to gain simply by fighting Iran. . . . He was . . . quietly assured by the United States that it would have no objection to his claiming his prize—Kuwait—once he defeated Iran.

In a July 25, 1990 meeting with U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, Saddam Hussein was informed, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Meanwhile, the U.S. encouraged Kuwait to continue its slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.

A high point of the public relations campaign to justify war against Iraq, was the testimony of a Kuwaiti refugee, before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 15, 1990, who told of Iraqi troops removing over 300 babies from incubators in Kuwait City hospital, and dumping them on the floor to die.

On January 6, 1992, Harper’s Magazine, revealed that “Nayirah,” the alleged refugee, was the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and that Hill and Knowlton, a large public relations firm, had helped prepare her testimony, which she had rehearsed before video cameras in the firm’s Washington office.

“When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf,” wrote Scott Peterson (Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002),

part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border—just empty desert.

Scott Ritter, former UN Special Commission inspector, claims that Richard Butler, former chief UN weapons inspector, “deliberately planned UN inspections in 1998 to orchestrate a confrontation between Iraq and the UN so the United States could carry out its threats to bomb Iraq.” Ritter makes the allegations in a documentary film, In Shifting Sands . . . the Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq, shown to journalists at the UN (Ronni Berke, CNN, July 19, 2001).

Eurasia

Former National Security Advisor to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote (The Grand Chessboard, 1997):

A power that dominates Eurasia [the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean—including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent] would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination,

. . . About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.

The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics.

The “United States is pitted in this struggle against Russia, China, and Iran, all competing to dominate the Caspian region, its resources and pipeline routes” (Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game, 2004).

President George W. Bush has frequently stated that the U.S. would leave Iraq if asked by Baghdad’s leadership. Now that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has asked for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, the Bush administration and the U.S. military leadership are continuing to pressure their client regime to accept the U.S. demand for long-term military bases in Iraq (Patrick Cockburn, Independent, June 6, 2008).

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq’s money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, . . .

Iraqi officials say that, last year, they wanted to diversify their holdings out of the dollar, as it depreciated, into other assets, such as the euro, more likely to hold their value. This was vetoed by the US Treasury because American officials feared it would show lack of confidence in the dollar.

And sources in Iraq’s parliament told Press TV (May 29, 2008) that Washington has offered three-million dollar bribes to lawmakers who sign the “framework accord” which will permit U.S. bases in Iraq after the UN mandate expires at the end of 2008.

'9/11 Unveiled' (Part 1 of 10): Attack, Response

On September 11, 2001, America was attacked.

At 8:47 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the south tower.

At 9:38 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 out of Washington’s Dulles International Airport, bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the western wall of the Pentagon.

At 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 out of Newark, bound for San Francisco, crashed near Pittsburgh.

The 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were obliterated. The Pentagon suffered massive damage. Aircraft debris was found in Pennsylvania.

According to reports, the death toll was 2750 persons—mostly civilian nationals of 90 countries—at the World Trade Center, 125 persons at the Pentagon, and 265 passengers and crew on the four planes.

Seven years later, what really happened on 9/11, remains shrouded in a veil of doubts and secrecy.

Terrorists were reported to have hijacked the planes, and two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell identified Osama Bin Laden as the prime suspect.

Europol’s director, Jurgen Storbeck, stated (Telegraph, September 15, 2001): “It’s possible that he [bin Laden] was informed about the operation; it’s even possible that he influenced it; but he’s probably not the man who steered every action or controlled the detailed plan.”

On September 16, President Bush, brushing off doubts about Osama bin Laden, declared a “crusade” to “rid the world of evil-doers”.

On the day of the attack on America, the Washington Times quoted a paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies which said that the MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence service, “Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.”

After 9/11, dozens of Israelis were reported to have been arrested, but the role played by this “huge Israeli spy ring that may have trailed suspected al-Qaeda members in the United States without informing federal authorities” remained unclear, and “it is no longer tenable to dismiss the possibility of an Israeli angle in this story,” wrote Justin Raimondo (antiwar.com, March 8, 2002).

Field reports by the Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and other U.S. law enforcement officials, on the alleged Israeli spy ring have been compiled in a 60-page document (John F. Sugg, Weekly Planet, April 22, 2002).

DEA agents say that the 60-page document was a draft intended as the base for a 250-page report. The larger report has not been produced because of the volatile nature of suggesting that Israel spies on America’s deepest secrets.

Others suggest that Israel’s MOSSAD had foreknowledge of 9/11. Fox News’ Carl Cameron did a 4-part series on this episode (December 2001).

The attacks on 9/11 led to the U.S. war on Afghanistan—a war planned prior to 9/11, after negotiations with the Taliban for a pipeline had broken down.

The Taliban, after initially negotiating with Unocal, had begun showing a preference for Bridas Corporation of Argentina. During the negotiations—which ocurred prior to 9/11—“U.S. representatives told the Taliban (Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Bin Laden, The Forbidden Truth), ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October (BBC News, September 18, 2001).

And the Irish Times (February 11, 2002) reported:

The Pakistani President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and the Afghan interim leader, Mr. Hamid Karzai, agreed yesterday that their two countries should develop “mutual brotherly relations and cooperate in all spheres of activity”— including a proposed gas pipeline from Central Asia to Pakistan via Afghanistan.

It’s curious that these two leaders, who only later vowed to “bury the recent history of poisonous relations” between their nations (Washington Post, April 3, 2002), could agree so quickly to the pipeline. Afghanistan’s interim president Hamid Karzai, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush-appointed special envoy to Afghanistan, probably facilitated the agreement.

According to George Monbiot (Guardian, February 12):

Both Hamid Karzai, the interim president, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy, were formerly employed as consultants to Unocal, the U.S. oil company which spent much of the 1990s seeking to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

Zalmay Khalilzad drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan gas pipeline. In 2003, Zalmay Khalizad became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and on June 22, 2005 was sworn in as ambassador to Iraq.

While the identities of the hijackers remained in doubt, despite U.S. statements that 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the Taliban had stated their willingness to give up Osama bin Laden for trial to an international court, on October 7, 2001, without the benefit of a UN resolution, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom launched their war on Afghanistan—one of the world’s poorest countries, already devastated by 23 years of war and civil strife resulting from the Russian invasion of 1979.

U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said (Irwin Arieff, Reuters, October 8, 2001), in a letter to the 15-nation Security Council, that the investigation into the attacks on his country “has obtained clear and compelling information that the al-Qaeda organization, which is supported by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, had a central role in the attacks.”

The letter added, “there is still much we do not know. Our inquiry is in its early stages”—but that did not prevent the U.S. from launching a war on Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan created a million new refugees (adding to the existing five or six million), caused the death of 5,000 civilians by bombing, another 20,000 were killed indirectly.

President George H. W. Bush is reported to have told U.S. troops in Kuwait that they were “doing the Lord’s work” (AFP, January 19, 2000). President George W. Bush would claim “he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold of Afghanistan” (Independent, October 7, 2005).

More than six months after the U.S. launched its “war on terrorism,” hard evidence regarding the 9/11 attack remained scarce.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III admitted (Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2002):

In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States, or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.

The war on Afghanistan seemed to follow the script written by The Project for the New American Century.

Award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker, John Pilger, wrote (December 16, 2002):

Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W. Bush said what America needed was ‘a new Pearl Harbor’. Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true.

Thousands of Muslim immigrants were rounded up after the attacks of September 11. They were subjected to long-term detentions without due process of law, and immediate deportation. The homes and offices of prominent Muslim leaders were raided. There was FBI surveillance of Muslim activity, secret evidence was used by government prosecutors, and several Islamic charities were closed.

Next it was Iraq’s turn—the decision had been made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 2004):

In the hours immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks . . . Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism.” The president allegedly replied that “public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible”.

Prodded by the neocons, on March 19, 2003, the U.S. launched a preemptive war on Iraq.

Israeli journalist Ari Shavit (Haaretz, April 5, 2003) wrote:

The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history

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In June 2005, Michael Smith, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London, revealed the secret Downing Street memo, dated July 23, 2002, outlining an agreement between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to fix the facts and intelligence on Iraq.

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

To further prepare Americans for war, they were led to believe that Islamic extremists were responsible for anthrax attacks in the U.S. that began on September 18, 2001, and continued for several weeks.

White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by al-Qaeda (James Gordon Meeks, New York Daily News, August 2, 2008).

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon.

On October 18, 2001, Senator McCain, on the David Letterman show, said the anthrax may have come from Iraq, and that Iraq was the “second phase” of the war in Afghanistan.

Several days later, on Meet the Press, Joe Lieberman made a “concerted effort to try and link the anthrax in the public mind to Saddam Hussein” and to Iraq and Islamic radicalism (democracynow.org, August 4, 2008).

9/11 was a godsend for the U.S. military-industrial complex. A $48 billion increase in the defense budget sailed through both houses of Congress, bringing U.S. military spending to $379 billion.

This represented (Washington Post, January 27, 2002)

the biggest one-year rise since the Reagan buildup two decades ago and a suspension of “the peace dividend.” . . . It matches the combined military spending of the 15 countries with the next biggest defense budgets.

U.S. energy companies also received a dividend.

In July 2008, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Total were granted no-bid contracts in Iraq (Naomi Klein, democracynow.org, July 15, 2008)

to manage existing fields in Iraq and hold onto 75 percent of the worth of those contracts and leave only 25 percent for Iraqis . . . where 51 percent for the country is the baseline for new exploration, for new fields.

In the past couple of years, many Americans have begun to believe that the U.S. government’s version of 9/11 is either incomplete, or incorrect.

In August 2006, Scripps Howard News Service reported:

More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

In September 2006, Time magazine reported that 36 percent of Americans believed the government’s complicity in the events of 9/11.

In October 2006, Angus Reid Global Monitor reported:

Many adults in the United States believe the current federal government has not been completely forthcoming on the issue of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to a poll by the New York Times and CBS News. 53 per cent of respondents think the Bush administration is hiding something, and 28 per cent believe it is lying.

The 9/11 Commission’s chairman Thomas H. Kean and vice-chairman Lee H. Hamilton have written that they were “setup to fail” (Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, 2007). Senator Max Cleland resigned from the 9/11 Commission saying “It’s a scam”. Senator Bob Kerrey “threatened to resign”.

The 9/11 investigation was directed by Philip Zelikow who seemed to have little interest in finding out what really happened on 9/11. This is clear from the way he structured the investigation.

Zelikow divided the staff into nine teams: al-Qaeda and its history, intelligence collection, counter-terrorism policy, terrorist financing, border security and immigration, the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agency, aviation and transportation security, emergency response, federal government’s emergency response (Philip Shenon, The Commission, 2008, p86).

Zelikow, author of The National Security Strategy of the United States—the new preemptive war doctrine of the Bush administration written for then NSC Director, Condoleezza Rice—had worked on the Bush transition team. He had a hidden agenda: connect al-Qaeda and Iraq (Shenon, p130).
The rationale for the war on Iraq, to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, soon unravelled, and gave a boost to the “9/11 Truth” movement.

The Family Steering Committee were the first to push for an investigation of 9/11. A milestone of sorts was C-Span’s broadcast of Prof. David Ray Griffin’s talk from Wisconsin in April 2005—arranged by Kevin Barrett, of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth. Now Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and others demand a new investigation, and the issue is about to be placed on the ballot in New York.

The demands for a new investigation are based on fatal flaws in The 9/11 Commission Report. The following sections reveal what did, or did not, happen on 9/11. But first . . .