Stop Belittling the Theories About September
11
by Bill Christison www.dissidentvoice.org August 14, 2006  |
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However
horrendous the crimes of two of the world�s great liars and terrorists
in Gaza and Lebanon, it is imperative that we not let the deeds of Ehud
Olmert and George W. Bush distract us from another recent event.
The U.S. alliance with Israel and the
power of the lobby that lets Israel so easily influence U.S. foreign
policy have been major factors in allowing the monstrous slaughter of
innocent civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. What is happening in these lands
may also encourage Olmert and Bush to start new hostilities in Syria and
heavy, possibly nuclear, bombings in Iran -- and this entire mess of
neocon pottage may lead to a new World War and clashes of civilizations
and religious fundamentalisms that these two wretched politicians seem
quite literally to want to impose on the rest of us. It�s a tough case
to make that anything else going on in the world -- anywhere -- could
possibly be of equal importance.
But on July 29 and 30, and then again on
August 1, something else happened that increasing numbers of people
believe is of equal importance. On these dates C-SPAN rebroadcast
a panel discussion, held originally in late June, sponsored by an
organization called the American Scholars� Symposium to discuss
what really happened on September 11, 2001. Held in Los Angeles, the
meeting lasted two days, and the C-SPAN rebroadcast covered one almost
two-hour wrap-up session. The meeting was attended by 1,200 people
interested in hearing something other than the official story of 9/11.
The TV audience was evidently large enough to spur C-SPAN to broadcast
the panel discussion five separate times in four days.
Even a month late, this is a lot of
airtime for stories that many people call conspiracy theories -- and for
which many others use nastier descriptions. It is possible that the head
of C-SPAN, Brian Lamb, so strongly disbelieves the conspiracy theories
that he felt giving them ample publicity would discredit them
further. It is equally possible, however, that Lamb, who seems honestly
to believe in presenting various sides of most issues as fairly as he
can (although not always giving every side equal time), tried to do
exactly that on the many legitimate questions raised about what actually
happened on September 11. In any event, C-SPAN has made a major effort
to bring information on the principal theories about 9/11 to the
mainstream U.S. media. Lamb cannot be blamed for the coincidence that
recent heavy military activity in Gaza and Lebanon is nearly drowning
out his efforts.
Let�s address the real issues here. Why is
it important that we not let the so-called conspiracy theories
surrounding 9/11 be drowned out? After spending the better part of the
last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have
devoted serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and
have also carefully watched several videos that are available on the
subject. I have come to believe 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. I now think there is persuasive evidence that the events of
September did not unfold as the Bush administration and the 9/11
Commission would have us believe. The items below highlight the major
questions surrounding 9/11 but do not constitute a detailed recounting
of the evidence available.
ONE: An airliner almost certainly did not
hit The Pentagon. Hard physical evidence supports this conclusion; among
other things, the hole in the Pentagon was considerably smaller than an
airliner would create. The building was thus presumably hit by something
smaller, possibly a missile, or a drone or, less possibly, a smaller
manned aircraft. Absolutely no information is available on what happened
to the original aircraft (American Airlines Flight 77), the crew, the
�hijackers,� and the passengers. The �official story,� as it appeared in
The 9/11 Commission Report simply says, �At 9:37:46, American
Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, traveling at approximately
530 miles per hour. All on board, as well as many civilians and military
personnel in the building, were killed.� This allows readers to assume
that pieces of the aircraft and some bodies of passengers were found in
the rubble of the crash, but information so far released by the
government does not show that such evidence was in fact found. The story
put out by the Pentagon is that the plane and its passengers were
incinerated; yet video footage of offices in the Pentagon situated at
the edge of the hole clearly shows office furniture undamaged. The size
of the hole in the Pentagon wall still remains as valid evidence and so
far seems irrefutable.
TWO: The North and South Towers of the
World Trade Center almost certainly did not collapse and fall to earth
because hijacked aircraft hit them. A plane did not hit Building 7 of
the Center, which also collapsed. All three were most probably
destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings
before 9/11. A substantial volume of evidence shows that typical
residues and byproducts from such demolition charges were present in the
three buildings after they collapsed. The quality of the research done
on this subject is quite impressive.
If the judgments made on Points ONE and
TWO above are correct, they raise many �Who done it� questions and
strongly suggest that some unnamed persons or groups either inside or
with ties to the government were actively creating a �Pearl Harbor�
event, most likely to gain public support for the aggressive foreign
policies that followed -- policies that would, first, �transform� the
entire Middle East, and second, expand U.S. global domination.
These first two points provide the
strongest evidence available that the �official story� of 9/11 is not
true. If the government could prove this evidence false, and its own
story on these points correct, all the other data and speculation
supporting the conspiracy theories would be undermined. It has provided
no such proof and no answers to growing questions.
Other, less important points supporting
the theories include the following.
THREE: For at least one hour and 45
minutes after the hijacking of the first aircraft was known, U.S. air
defense authorities failed to take meaningful action. This strikes some
�conspiracy theorists� as valid evidence that the U.S. Air Force was
deliberately restrained from acting. Maybe so, but my own skepticism
tells me that the inefficiency of U.S. defense forces is likely to be
just as plausible an explanation.
FOUR: Some of the theorists believe that
the 19 named hijackers were not actually the hijackers. One claim is
that the names of the hijackers were not on the manifests of any of the
four aircraft.
FIVE: None of the 19 hijackers� bodies
were ever autopsied (since they were allegedly totally destroyed in the
crashes, including even the people in the Pennsylvania crash).
SIX: At least five of the alleged
hijackers (or persons with identical names) have since turned up alive
in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the FBI has never bothered to
re-investigate or revise the list of hijackers. Does this suggest that
the FBI knows that no one in the administration is interested in
reopening any further investigations?
SEVEN: Numerous pilots have allegedly told
the theorists that none of the 19 hijackers could have flown the
airliners well enough to hit the World Trade Center towers and the
Pentagon with as much accuracy as was displayed. The debate on this
issue simply raises more doubt about the government�s charge that the
people it has named as hijackers are the real hijackers.
EIGHT: No one, except possibly government
investigators who are not talking, has seen the plane that went down in
Pennsylvania. Some of the conspiracy theorists suggest that it was
deliberately destroyed before it hit the ground; others suggest that the
plane actually landed in Cleveland and that passengers then were whisked
away to some unknown destination. What happened to them at that point
is simply a large question mark that makes it more difficult to believe
this particular scenario.
NINE: Machinations in the U.S. stock
market in the days before 9/11 suggest that some inside players in the
market knew or suspected that United and American Airlines stock would
soon drop. Two of the four of the aircraft involved in 9/11 were, or
course, United planes and the other two were American Airlines planes.
It should be reemphasized that these items
do not make up a complete list of all the charges made by the theorists,
but they are a good sample. Anyone interested in perhaps the best
summary of these charges should
watch the
video �Loose Change.�
To repeat, points ONE and TWO above are
the most important. If something other than an airliner actually did hit
the Pentagon on 9/11, and if the North and South Towers of the World
Trade Center actually were dropped to the ground by controlled
demolitions rather than by anything connected to the hijackings, the
untrue stories peddled by The 9/11 Commission Report are clearly
susceptible of being turned into major political issues.
A Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio
University poll taken from July 6 to 24, 2006 concluded that �more than
a third [36 percent] of the American public suspects that federal
officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to
stop them, so that the United States could go to war in the Middle
East.� The poll also found that �16 percent of Americans speculate that
secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real
reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.�
A poll done by the Zogby polling
organization two months earlier, between May 12 and 16, 2006, and using
questions worded somewhat differently, suggested even more strongly that
the issue could become a �big one� if aggressively publicized. This poll
concluded that 42 percent of Americans believed there had indeed been a
cover-up of the true events of 9/11, and an additional 10 percent of
Americans were �unsure.� The co-author of the poll, W. David Kubiak,
stated that, �despite years of relentless media promotion, whitewash,
and 9/11 Commission propaganda, the official 9/11 story still can�t even
muster 50 percent popular support.�
Whichever of these polls is closer to the
truth, it would seem that there is considerable support for making a
major political issue of the subject.
This should be worked on at two different
levels. At the first level, the objective should be long-term, centered
on making a maximum effort to find out who the individuals and groups
are that carried out the attacks in New York and Washington. Then, these
people should be tried in an international court and, if possible,
convicted and punished for causing so many deaths. Such a trial,
accompanied by actual change in U.S. policies, would show that some
people on this globe are at least trying to move closer to more just and
decent behavior in human relationships around the world.
At the second level, the short term, the
task should be to immediately set to work as hard as is humanly possible
to defeat in this year�s congressional election any candidate who
refuses to support a no-holds-barred investigation of 9/11 by the
Congress or a high-level international court. No more evidence than is
now available is needed in order to begin this process.
A manageable volume of carefully collected
and analyzed evidence is already at hand on both items ONE and TWO
above. Such evidence should be used right now to buttress charges that
elements within the Bush administration, as well as possibly other
groups foreign or domestic, were involved in a massive fraud against the
American people, a fraud that has led to many thousands of deaths.
This charge of fraud, if proven, involves
a much greater crime against the American people and people of the world
than any other charges of fraud connected to the run-up to the invasion
of Iraq in March 2003. It is a charge that we should not sweep under the
rug because what is happening in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Iran
seems more pressing and overwhelming. It is a charge that is more
important because it is related to all of the areas just mentioned --
after all, the events of 9/11 have been used by the administration to
justify every single aspect of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East
since September 11. It is a charge that is more important also because
it affects the very core of our entire political system. If proven, it
is a conspiracy, so far successful, not only against the people of the
United States, but against the entire world. Finally, it is a charge too
important to ignore simply because the U.S. government refuses to
discuss it. We must force the Bush administration to discuss it.
Discussions aggressively pushed day after
day about what really happened on 9/11 will be one of the most important
tasks between now and early November. Such discussions can, one hopes,
provide progressives with a way to jolt voters out of their apathy and
inchoate willingness to support the status quo that they think
gives them security -- and encourage more voters to stop
supporting Bush, the Republicans, and the wobbly Democratic politicians
who might as well be Republicans. A major issue like this, already
supported by many voters, may prove particularly important in a
congressional election year when new uncertainties in the Middle East,
new possibilities of terrorism against the U.S. in retaliation for
recent large-scale acts of Israeli/U.S. terrorism in Gaza and Lebanon,
and the corrupt almost-single-party U.S. political system combine to
make it more likely that supporters of Bush will retain their majority
this November.
In terms of electoral impact, it would not
matter whether heavy publicity did in fact force the administration to
accept a new high-level investigation of the 9/11 events. Initially, the
principal goal would be to contribute heavily to the defeat of both
Republicans and Democrats who refuse to support wholeheartedly a major
new investigation by Congress or an international court. This might
result in the defeat of more Republicans than Democrats in November, but
ultimately the hoped-for goal should be the end of a system in which
Democrats are barely different from Republicans, along with cutbacks in
the political power of wealth and the foreign and domestic lobbies paid
for by wealth. These are the dominant features of our system today that
have practically eliminated meaningful democracy in the U.S. This
failure of democracy has happened before in U.S. history, but this time
it is likely to last longer -- at least until U.S. policies begin to pay
as much attention to the needs of the world as they do to selfish or
thoughtless needs of the U.S. and of its military-industrial
complex. Attacks on the criminal events surrounding 9/11 might speed
this process.
Virtually no members of Congress,
Democratic or Republican, will relish calling for a further
investigation of 9/11. For right now, in addition to other motives, the
issue should be used to go after those political prostitutes among
elected office-holders who should also be defeated because they are so
easily seduced by money and power to vote for immoral wars against weak
enemies.
At the Los Angeles meeting of the
American Scholars� Symposium, one of the main speakers, Webster
Tarpley, summarized his own views on the events of 9/11. He emphasized
that �neocon fascist madmen� had perpetrated the 9/11 �myth.� He went on
to say, �The most important thing is that the 9/11 myth is the premise
and the root of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War and the coming
attack on Iran. ... We must ... deprive [the myth�s perpetrators] of the
ability to stampede and manipulate hundreds of millions of people [with
their] ... cynically planned terrorist events.�
Let�s give Webster Tarpley and other
mistakenly labeled conspiracists who have labored in the wilderness for
so long three cheers.
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 before his retirement in 1979. Since then he has written
numerous articles on U.S. foreign policies. He can be reached at:
kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.
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