How Controlled Explanations Are Achieved
Paul Craig Roberts
In 2014 Progressive Press published a book by a French author, Laurent Guyenot, titled JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep State. The book contains much interesting reporting that shows that the official explanations we are given about even major events, such as the assassination of a President and 9/11, are transparently false. Yet, these transparently false explanations are hard to challenge despite all
available evidence being against the explanations.
Reviewing such a book is a challenge that I avoided by securing permission to reprint two chapters from the book. One chapter, “Ghost planes,” deals with the mystery of the four allegedly hijacked airliners. No trace of the one that allegedly hit the Pentagon has ever been found, and the many videos of the event remain under lock and key. No trace of the one that allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania has ever been found. Neither has any trace of the two that allegedly hit the two World Trade Center towers ever been found, although an unburnt passpost was allegedly found in the ruins of two massive buildings.
Readers might remember that I raised the question why we did not hear demands for explanations from the families of the victims of the four destroyed airliners like we did from the families whose relatives were in the twin towers. Guyenot reports that of the alleged casualties of AA77 “only five of these have relatives who received the 9-11 Compensation Fund offered by the State. . . . no family of the victims of Flight UA93 requested compensation.”
How can this be?
The other chapter, “The Art of the Patsy,” shows that the key to the ability of the authorities to control the explanation is to have an explanation of the event ready at hand. No one expected President Kennedy’s assassination or he wouldn’t have been riding in a convertible. Yet it was instantly known that Oswald was the assassin. The explanation for 9/11 was also instantaneous. It was CIA-asset Osama bin Laden, who was dying from renal failure and no longer useful to the CIA.
If you find Guyenot interesting, you might want to read his book. What Guyenot shows us is that what the CIA has schooled the dumbshit presstitute media to ridicule as “conspiracy theory” is indeed a conspiracy, a real one usually involving the CIA.
Sorry. The images didn’t transfer.
Ghost Planes
The government’s narrative on 9/11 says that the Boeing 757 of Flight UA93 (from New Jersey to San Francisco) crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after the passengers fought the hijackers and prevented them from flying the aircraft into the White House or Camp David. But in the images of the impact site released on the same day, it is impossible to distinguish any wreckage of an airliner; even the reporters who had rushed to the scene were perplexed. The first to arrive there, Jon Meyer of WJAC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, declared: “I was able to get right up to the edge of the crater. […] All I saw was a crater filled with small, charred plane parts. Nothing that would even tell you that it was the plane. […] There were no suitcases, no recognizable plane parts, no body parts.” The Mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, early on the scene with his sister and a friend, declared in March 2003: “Everyone was puzzled, because the call had been that a plane had crashed. But there was no plane. […] Nothing. Only this hole.”
[Image LG17-1 Shanksville]
Photographer Scott Spangler recalls his surprise when looking at the crash scene of UA93: “I didn’t think I was in the right place. I was looking for a wing or a tail. There was nothing, just this pit.”
The Boeing 757 of Flight AA77 (from Washington to Los Angeles) that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon also could not be found. French journalist Thierry Meyssan was the first to draw conclusions in 9/11: The Big Lie, a dissenting investigation published in March 2002 based on pictures from the Department of Defense and Associated Press. The lawn before the crash site was immaculate, the two or three pieces of debris that could be seen were ridiculously small, and could not be identified as belonging to a Boeing. The reporter Jamie McIntyre of CNN, who arrived at the Pentagon an hour after the crash, was perplexed: “From my close-up inspection, there is no evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon. […] the only pieces left that you can see are small enough that you pick up in your hand. There are no large tail sections, wing sections, fuselage, nothing like that anywhere around which would indicate that the entire plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon.”
[Image LG17-2 Pentagon lawn]
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski of the U.S. Air Force, who was on the scene within minutes after the explosion at the Pentagon, reported: “I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact—no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. […] all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.”
Was the plane buried deep into the building? No photo taken inside the crash site shows even the slightest credible scrap of a plane, and witnesses say that they did not see anything that would suggest an airplane. April Gallop was in her office with her son of two months, 10 or 15 meters from the impact zone. She felt an explosion, and then the ceiling fell in on her; in making her way towards the exit with her child, she saw nothing that made her think that a plane had crashed, “no wreckage, no airplane fragments, no engines, no seats, no luggage, no fuselage sections with rows of windows, and especially, no blazing quantities of burning jet fuel.”
[Image LG17-3 Does not fit]
“I look at the hole in the Pentagon, and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon, and I say: the plane does not fit in that hole. So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What’s going on?” (General Albert Stubblebine, head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command from 1981 to 1984).
Did Flight 77 just vanish? Did the fire, hardly noticeable in the photos, melt its hundred tons of metal, as was suggested by the government? If that were in fact the case, how did they manage to identify all the passengers through their fingerprints and DNA analysis, as has been claimed? (None of the allegedly dead bodies, by the way, has been identified by a relative: they were all transferred to a military base, where they were incinerated.)
[Image LG17-4 Pentagon hole]
We are asked to believe that the plastic nose of a Boeing 757 made this hole after going through five other reinforced concrete walls, as Rumsfeld himself announced on Good Morning America (ABC), September 13. It resembles rather the damage done by a shell with a hollow charge, designed to perforate such walls.
The recordings of 85 video cameras, either placed at the Pentagon or in the general vicinity, were seized by government agents, but no recognizable image of the aircraft was made public. Only one sequence was released by court order in May 2006, and it includes four images that show an object exploding as it hits the Pentagon, but they do little to suggest that it is an airplane that caused the blast. Curiously, the film is dated September 12, not 11. According to some experts, the yellow light emitted by the explosion in the images could not have been caused by jet fuel, and neither can the odor of cordite (an explosive made from nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose and nitroguanidine) that some Pentagon employees have reported.
Professional pilots united around Rob Balsamo as part of Pilots for 9/11 Truth have analyzed the trajectory of Flight AA77 provided by the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) and demonstrated that it was physically impossible for a Boeing airliner. The aircraft descended in an extremely perilous spiral maneuver, finally hitting the second floor of the west façade horizontally, without hitting the turf in front of the building. It is impossible, since at such low altitude and high speed, such a plane loses all of its lift. And even if it were possible, the feat would have been beyond the capacity of Hani Hanjour, the alleged pilot of the aircraft. A few months before September 11th, Hanjour was written up for incompetence by his Arizona flight school JetTech, who then called for the withdrawal of his license. An instructor at JetTech is quoted in the New York Times, April 5, 2002 saying: “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.” The other supposed hijackers in the plane were no better: Nawaq al-Hazmi and Khaid al-Mihdhar’s instructor in San Diego declared to the Washington Post (September 24, 2001): “Their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse. […] It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car.”
[Image LG17-5 Mubarak]
In a CNN interview on September 15, 2001, then again on BBC on September 19th, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak questioned the official U.S. explanation regarding 9/11. As a fighter pilot, he said in a later article, “I find it hard to believe that people who were learning to fly in Florida could, within a year and a half, fly large commercial airlines and hit with accuracy the towers of the World Trade Center which would appear, to the pilot from the air, the size of a pencil.” Mubarak would soon pay the price.
Air defense is the responsibility of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), and in particular its NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector) department. NORAD had successfully intercepted 67 planes throughout the twelve months preceding September 11, 2001, each time in less than twenty minutes. Intercept tactics are triggered at the slightest alarm, as part of precautionary measures. Even if we assume that NORAD could not have intercepted Flights AA11 and UA175 before they crashed into the Twin Towers, it is incomprehensible that it could not intercept Flight AA77, which supposedly crashed 50 minutes later into the Pentagon, the most secure building in the world. Something or somebody must have deliberately prevented normal procedure, as Robert Bowman, Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force, has assumed: “If our government had done nothing that day and let normal procedure be followed, those planes, wherever they were, would have been intercepted, the Twin Towers would still be standing and thousands of dead Americans would still be alive.”
Contradicting Condoleezza Rice and President Bush, who declared in 2002 that no one could have predicted this kind of attack, USA Today revealed on April 18, 2004 that NORAD was conducting, four times a year since 1999, military drills—or war games—that involved aircraft hijacked by terrorists and directed against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. With these new facts, the rather shallow excuses for American air defense ineffectiveness on September 11 were turned on their head: it was then explained that on that very day, NORAD was occupied with five military exercises, three of which, under the names of Vigilant Guardian, Global Guardian, and Vigilant Warrior, were simulated hijackings, both with real and virtual flights. Consequently, according to Colonel Robert Marr, head of NEADS, as many as twenty-nine “hijacked planes” were on the radar screens at NORAD on that day. According to Lieutenant Colonel Dwane Deskins, head of Vigilant Guardian quoted in an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard on January 20, 2002, everyone concerned at NEADS initially thought that the announcement of the hijacking of Flight AA11 was part of the ongoing military exercises.
This aspect of the case is crucial to understanding the unfolding of the attacks on September 11th. As explains Captain Eric May, a former intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, “the easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out.” Once the exercise is fully developed, it will require nothing more but to change a single parameter to turn the operation from simulated to real. Those who plan and oversee the drill are not necessarily those who hijack it to turn it into real. Most participants in the 9/11 synthetic terror act, accustomed to obey military orders and the established “rules of the (war) game,” perform their appointed mission without knowing that the attack will turn out to be “real”. When they realize what they have been involved in, they simultaneously grasp the danger of raising objections; they themselves have been framed. As in the Kennedy assassination, military discipline is the key to ensuring the necessary silence of all unwilling, or unknowing participants.
[Image LG17-6 Peter Power]
Hours after the London bombings of July 6, 2005 (claimed by an improbable “Secret Al-Qaeda in Europe”), Peter Power, a former Scotland Yard official turned manager of a private security company, revealed on BBC Radio 5, then again on ITV News, that he was conducting on that very morning, for a private company of the City, a simulation employing one thousand persons, “based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning.” “So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from ‘fictional’ to ‘real’.” The website of his company Visor Consultants emphasizes that the crisis drills they design aspire to be “Making the scenario come alive and be as realistic as possible.” It would be foolish to think that Power has made a blunder by his revelation; he probably saved his life.
All things considered, it is highly doubtful whether any of the airline flights reportedly hijacked on 9/11 were involved in the attacks. The Bureau of Transportation, which holds precise records of all flights, has no trace of Flight AA77 on September 11th; it was not planned at Dulles Airport that day, and its takeoff was not recorded. As for Flight UA93, it doesn’t normally circulate Tuesdays, but as an exception, it had taken passengers initially planned for Flight UA91, which had been canceled due to a “crack in the windshield.” This flight was recorded at takeoff, but then it is also recorded as having landed in San Francisco at noon, 45 minutes late. Finally, the mayor of Cleveland, Michael White, was quoted at 11:50 am on ABC News saying that a Boeing 767 flying out of Boston was forced to make an emergency landing in Cleveland due to a bomb threat, and had been taken to a secure area of the airport to be evacuated. The plane was identified as Flight UA93—although a Boeing 767 out of Boston corresponded rather to the Flight UA175.
The problem of the “transponders” is also perplexing. This device transmits the position of aircraft to control towers, and also allows the pilot to send alert and emergency messages. Incredibly, none of the eight pilots or their professional copilots entered the four-digit code on the transponder which signals an assault on the cockpit—a maneuver that takes only three seconds. In fact, each aircraft actually cut their respective transponders, and then completely disappeared from secondary radars for nearly an hour while going through radar gaps. For example, AA77 left Washington for Los Angeles, disappeared from radars near Ohio and was spotted again an hour later near Washington DC.
According to official reports, many passengers of Flights UA93, UA175 and AA77 had made calls to relatives or friends from their portable phones. Details of these calls (by passengers named Jeremy Glick, Peter Hanson, Brian Sweeney, Mark Bingham, Elizabeth Wainio, Marion Britton, Sandra Bradshaw, Tom Burnett, Edward Felt, CeeCee Lyles) were reported as early as September 13th on mainstream TV channels and newspapers (like The Washington Post). But they are highly problematic, because the technology required to make high-altitude phone calls was not developed until 2004. Moreover, some calls include oddities completely incongruent with the context, exemplified by Mark Bingham’s call to his mother a few seconds before his death: “Hi, Mom. This is Mark Bingham.”
Two calls were allegedly made from AA77 by Barbara Olson to her husband Ted Olson. The Olsons are both public figures: Barbara was a well-known CNN reporter, and Ted has been Solicitor General during the first Bush term (after defending Bush in the disputed 2000 election, and then Dick Cheney when he refused to submit to Congress Enron-related documents during their investigation). Barbara Olson’s calls, reported on CNN in the afternoon of September 11th, contributed to crystallizing some details of the official story, such as the “box cutters” used by the hijackers. Repeatedly invited on television shows, Ted Olson frequently contradicted himself when questioned regarding the calls from his wife. Sometimes he said she “called him twice on a cell phone ” adding that the second call was cut because “the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.” Sometimes he said that his wife called collect from the “air phone” because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.” This second version is as impossible as the first, because a credit card is required to activate the phones in the seats, even for a collect call, though really the entire argument is moot, given that the seats on AA77 were not equipped with telephones (as confirmed by American Airlines). The most troubling contradiction appeared in 2006, during the trial of supposed terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui: in their report on Flight AA77, the FBI attributed only one call from Barbara Olson, and it was an unconnected call lasting 0 seconds.
Given the many impossibilities woven throughout the official story, the alternative hypothesis that seems most likely is that none of the four airplanes were in fact the Boeing 767 or 757s the world was told about. Flights AA77 and UA93 probably never existed. As for Flights AA11 and UA175, which reportedly hit the Twin Towers, several hypotheses are in competition among 9/11 truthers. Many surmise that they had been replaced by drones—planes equipped with automatic remote control technology, and without passengers. But numerous witnesses have declared having seen no planes, while others saw missiles. No consensus has been reached on these matters. Simon Shack, in a groundbreaking documentary (September Clues, 2007), has analyzed the images of the second crash (South Tower) broadcast on September 11th and later, and argued that they are fakes, fabricated with various video editing software. This also applies to the only image of the first crash (North Tower), miraculously captured by the mysterious brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet. The TV forgeries have been further explored by Ace Baker in his 2012 documentary 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera, where he gives credence to professor Morgan Reynolds who has long claimed that the aluminum planes shown to penetrate the steel towers without resistance, defy physical laws and therefore must be video artifacts. Richard D. Hall of richplanet.net, however, after having attempted to show that the virtual planes added to the images were masking a missile-type object, has pointed out shortcomings in the video-compositing theory, and proposed an alternative theory based on holographic projections. Although there is yet no consensus on the method employed to create illusion, it is today clearly established that the planes penetrating the towers like butter, without being shattered or even decelerated at the impact, as seen on multiple TV footages, can in no way be real. The initial explosions seen at that precise moment must have another explanation.
[Image LG17-7 CNN ghost plane]
On this pic from the CNN footage of the second crash, the aluminum plane has half disappeared into the steel tower: a physical impossibility.
If no planes hit the Twin Towers any more than the Pentagon or the field outside Shanksville—all 9/11 Flights having been probably created virtual in the context of a drill—, then all speculations on the military identity of those planes can be counted as diversions. So can discussions on the failures of U.S. air defenses. Of course, if the planes did not fly on that day, neither did the passengers. False identities were created, and it would seem that the Intel agencies involved suffered severe shortages in this regard. For Flight AA77, for example, only 53 passengers are listed, while the plane’s capacity is 239. Among the 53 passengers plus 9 crew members, only 14 persons are listed in the Social Security Death Index. And only 5 of these have relatives who received the 9-11 Compensation Fund offered by the State. Moreover, the passenger list comprises an abnormal percentage of Navy officers and aeronautic engineers (13 out of 53). The other three “flights” show similar percentages of capacity and recorded deaths (no family of the victims of Flight UA93 requested compensation, for example).
The Art of the Patsy
Peter Dale Scott was one of the first scholars to point out some parallels between the Kennedy assassination and the September 11th attacks. Each of these events was specifically designed to justify the illegitimate invasion of a foreign country and the overthrow of its hostile regime: Cuba in the first case, Afghanistan in the second, with the difference that the invasion of Cuba was eventually called off. Each of the two false flag crimes also preceded a second lie that justified war, conducted unilaterally by the United States against a far away country: the mock incident in the Gulf of Tonkin justified the aggression against North Vietnam, just as the lies surrounding Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” justified the war against Iraq. Unlike the first two crimes, the two secondary lies are today publicly recognized as such by politicians and historians alike. In both cases, the plot originated in the upper echelons of the National Security State, and directly served the interests of the military-industrial complex and all its parasites. In both cases, the goal was to traumatize the American nation with a crime so heinous as to transform the public’s fear into hatred and build a national consensus for war against some stereotypical enemy who poses a mortal threat: Communism in the former case, Islamism in the second.
It is also interesting to look at the preparation and eventual execution of the two “deep events”; doing so reveals a characteristic pattern and thereby allows for the development of a “theory of false flag operations,” and an increased ability to expose them. In both cases, for example, we note that the pseudo-culprit is identified almost instantaneously, along with the murder weapon. Oswald was arrested and accused in the hour that followed his alleged crime. Bin Laden was not arrested, but his name was plastered across TV screens everywhere by a slew of so-called terrorism experts in the hours following the collapse of the towers. The aim is to quickly and efficiently cut off any alternative theory and inspire confidence in the veracity of the official narrative, marginalizing in advance all the skeptics. Official information, in this kind of event, circumvents public discussion and debate, preventing the people from collectively building hypothesis, interpretations, and meaning. Less than a week after September 11th, the Pakistani General Hameed Gul, a former ISI Director, who knew ben Laden and didn’t believe him to be able to orchestrate such operation, said to Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI’s inter- national editor at large: “Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center, CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.” Studies show that information received from an authority during a period of emotional shock—and thus rational vulnerability—is embedded into the memory of the trauma, in such a way that the distinction between facts and interpretation becomes impossible.
[Image LG18-1 Ideal witness]
Mark Walsh was interviewed by Fox News (for which he works as a freelancer) in the hour following the disintegration of the towers, providing the ideal eyewitness testimony. “I saw this plane come out of nowhere and just ream right into the side of the Twin Tower exploding through to the other side, and then I witnessed both towers collapse, the first, and then the second, mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense.” Conflating the observation and the technical explanation, in the very terms destined to become official, serves to cover the explanation which naturally comes to the mind of a neutral witness, such as journalist Don Dahler commenting on ABC News: “The entire building has just collapsed, as if a demolition team set off…”
Once the authorities assuredly designate a patsy, it becomes almost unnecessary to provide evidence of his guilt. It is remarkable that the FBI never formally charged bin Laden for the attacks of September 11th; he appears on the list of the ten most wanted criminals on their official website, but only as a suspect in the attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. When questioned by journalist Ed Hass of the Muckraker Report in June 2006, FBI spokesman Rex Tomb said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s ‘Most Wanted’ page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Even the identification of the hijackers was presented to the public without any evidence; instead, conflicting information abounds, casting serious doubt about those identified: the flight manifests first provided by United Airlines and American Airlines did not include the name of any of the 19 hijackers, and there are no video images showing them boarding. The little evidence of their identity that has been made public is so convenient it’s rendered hardly credible, for example two passports and one identity card of the hijackers recovered miraculously from the crash sites of Flights AA11, AA77 and UA93, or a Qur’an and flight manual in Arabic left by Mohamed Atta in a rental car.
[Image LG18-2 Passport]
The “magic passport” of Satam Al Suqami, supposed to have escaped Flight AA11 at the moment of the impact, to be then picked up in a street of Manhattan by an anonymous passerby and handed to the FBI. Likewise, the passport of Ziad Jarrah, pilot of Flight UA93, was found at Shanksville near the crash site, and the ID of Majed Moqed, one of the hijackers of Flight AA77, came out unburnt in front of the Pentagon, while the plane had vaporized.
A further parallel between the immediate identifications of the pseudo-culprits Oswald and bin Laden deserves to be mentioned: in both cases, they were charged with a second crime which strengthened the suspicion of their guilt in the public mind. An hour after Oswald was pinpointed, he was reported to have shot a police officer, J. D. Tippit, who had recognized him and approached him in the street. Similarly, the responsibility of the Taliban in the attacks of September 11th was made easier to believe by the report, one day before, of Commandant Massoud’s assassination, readily attributed to the same Al-Qaeda-Taliban alliance.
A good patsy is a dead patsy; that is another fundamental rule of false flag operations that we can see applied in both Kennedy’s assassination and September 11th. Once designated, the falsely accused culprit must be eliminated as soon as possible, because he will have nothing to lose in speaking out, and he knows enough to realize that he is the subject of something malicious. Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby two days after his alleged crime. That was already a bit late; the plan was probably to shoot him dead while trying to arrest him in the Texas Theater, where Jack Ruby was present according to manager George Applin. The news of Tippit’s murder would have been used to present Oswald as armed and dangerous and justify the shooting that led to his killing. It is unfortunate for the conspirators that Oswald had time to realize what was happening and say to the press: “I’m just a patsy.” This might be one of the mistakes that prompted them to abandon their Communist conspiracy theory, which would have incurred too many inconsistencies—including FBI agents interrogating him and thereafter not recognizing his voice on the Mexico tapes produced by the CIA.
In any case, a patsy’s claims to innocence are barely a speed bump when up against the steamroller of an aligned media; bin Laden’s denial meant nothing. As for the suicide hijackers, they were dead by definition. Again, however, problems arose: a few days after the FBI identified the culprits (September 14th), seven of the nineteen hijackers came forward through various channels, proving that they were alive—in Morocco, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere—and consequently innocent. The father of the supposed ringleader Mohamed Atta, a respected lawyer from Cairo, told the German magazine Bild am Sonntag in late 2002 that “[his] son called [him] the day after the attacks, September 12,” and that he was hiding out of fear for his life.
As for bin Laden, it’s not until April 30, 2011, in the operation known as “Neptune’s Spear,” that he is supposed to have been eliminated by a SEAL commando, shot fatally in the head in his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His body, we were told, was dumped in the sea after identification. The only picture presented to the public was a vulgar photomontage, as the media quickly acknowledged. The farce would be funny if not for the tragic epilogue: Friday, August 5th, 2011 around 11 pm, a Chinook helicopter of the U.S. Army crashed in a province in central Afghanistan after being hit by two rocket-propelled grenades (RPG-7s) shot, we are told, by the Afghan resistance. The attack killed 38, including 30 members of Navy SEAL Team 6, the elite unit who had led Neptune’s Spear. And thus there will be less chance of contradiction to the official story of bin Laden’s death. Family members of the dead SEALs are now raising questions, however.
[Image LG18-3 Fake corpse]
The cheap Photoshop fake of bin Laden’s corpse, sold to the public before being denounced as a fraud days later.
It’s likely that bin Laden actually died in late 2001, as was announced by the Pakistani President Musharraf (CNN, January 18, 2002), the Afghan President Hamid Karzai (CNN, October 7, 2002), and the leader of the anti-terrorism division of the FBI, Dale Watson (BBC, July 18, 2002). On January 28, 2002, CBS reported that on the eve of September 11th bin Laden had been treated in a military hospital in Pakistan for kidney dialysis, and was escorted by the Pakistani army. How could he have survived until 2011, holed up in the caves of Afghanistan, when he had to undergo dialysis every three days? More troubling still: two months earlier, bin Laden stayed at the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the local CIA station chief Larry Mitchell. This information comes from credible sources (administrative management of the hospital, members of the Saudi royal family, and French Intelligence) and was covered by French newspaper Le Figaro in October 2001.
There were two advantages in holding back the announcement of bin Laden’s death until 2011. First, it allowed the continued invasion of Afghanistan under the auspices of a manhunt. Second, it allowed bin Laden to “speak” when needed, and thus clear the doubts raised by his denials; better than a dead patsy, the architects of the September 11 deception created for themselves a virtual patsy. The guilt of bin Laden is based mainly upon three video confessions “accredited by the CIA.” The first was mysteriously found in December 2001 in Jellalabad, translated and released two months later. Despite the poor image quality, it is easy to see that the character presented as bin Laden is hardly a credible semblance.
[Image LG18-4 Fake Ben Laden]
On the left, the bin Laden of the December 2001 video. On the right, the real bin Laden.
The second video appeared in October 2004, a week before the elections that reappointed George W. Bush. An independent analysis by the Swiss institute IDIAP specialized in perceptual intelligence, basing their study on comparisons with twenty previous recordings of bin Laden, concluded with 95% probability that the voice on the October tape is not that of bin Laden. A third video reached the public on September 8, 2007, in which bin Laden announced an intensification of Al-Qaeda activities in Iraq; this just before the debate in Congress regarding the need for new troops in Iraq. The image is frozen for most the message, and even when it is not, the quality is so bad that it is impossible to verify whether the movement of the lips corresponds to the soundtrack. Additionally, the videos of 2004 and 2007 were filmed in the same studio with the same frame and the same posture, but bin Laden looks younger on the second (he had dyed his beard black, it was explained).
[Image LG18-5 Ben Laden 2004-2007]
On the left, the bin Laden of the 2004 video. On the right, the same, three years later.
The 2007 video was provided to the government by the Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute (SITE), founded by Israeli-American Rita Katz, daughter of an Iraqi Jew executed by Saddam Hussein on the charge of spying for Israel.
After September 11th just like after Kennedy’s assassination, it was necessary to appease doubts with a Presidential Commission of inquiry. The 9/11 Commission was created in November 2002, and was led by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, but its executive director was Philip Zelikow, who also happened to be the senior editor of the NSS 2002 document defining Bush’s preemptive war doctrine. In 2006, Kean and Hamilton revealed in their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, that the Commission “was set up to fail” from the beginning, Zelikow having already written a synopsis and a conclusion for the final report before the first meeting. He controlled all the working groups, prevented them from communicating with each other, and gave them the singular mission to prove the official story; Team 1A, for example, was tasked to “tell the story of Al-Qaeda’s most successful operation—the 9/11 attacks.” All information, and any request for information, had to pass through him. On top of that, most of the information obtained by the commissioners from the CIA and NORAD was “far from the truth,” according to Kean and Hamilton. The Commission had no access to any direct evidence or even the recordings of the interrogations of the suspected Al-Qaeda members, which came to them third hand “in the form of reports, not even transcripts.” Commission members had to be content, for example, with CIA affirmations that the confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (described as the operational manager of the attacks), obtained between 183 waterboarding sessions, were certifiable evidence that bin Laden had authorized and supported the operation. Before the Commission published its final report in July 2004, several members expressed their frustration and resigned. One of them, Max Cleland, called the Commission a “national scandal”: “One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But the White House wants to cover it up.” John Farmer, the Senior Counsel, said for his part in The Washington Post: “what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when—was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.”
The Commission also threw a veil over one of the most disturbing facts around 9/11, which happened on the stock exchange: between the 6th and the 10th of September 2001, there were massive purchases of “put options,” twenty-five times higher than average, on American Airlines and United Airlines, whose shares fell 40% after the attacks, but also on companies housed in the WTC such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Company. The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) concluded on October 15th that the gains had been in the hundreds of millions of dollars and could be the “largest insider trade ever committed.” The Commission rejected the hypothesis in a few lines: “further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to Al-Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American [Airline] on September 10.” In other words: postulating that the culprit was Al-Qaeda, and noting that the investors in question did not have the Al-Qaeda profile, enabled the Commission to conclude implicitly that these suspicious transactions were just an unfortunate coincidence. The “institutional investor” in question was Alex Brown Inc., a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank whose former CEO and Chairman A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard (until 1998) had just become Executive Director of the CIA in March 2001.
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