“The whole
aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence
clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most
of them imaginary” — H.L. Mencken
As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was the release of a final report
of an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event
of international significance. On March 25th, the conclusion of a four
year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks
was published which determined that the collapse of World
Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire.
Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire.
The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth,
a nonprofit organization composed of more than 3,000 building
architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group’s formal
appeal calling for a new investigation into the three — not two
— WTC skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11. The researchers infer that the
collapse of Building 7 was actually the result of a controlled
demolition:
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
With or without a
pandemic, it is likely corporate media would have ignored the study
anyway, just as they have anything that contradicts the official story
of 9/11. However, it is notable that many have drawn parallels between
the COVID-19 outbreak and the 9/11 attacks based on the widespread
changes to daily life as a result of the crisis going forward. Already
there is talk of nationwide lockdowns as a “new normal” with many
rightly expressing concerns over civil liberties, press freedoms, the
surveillance state, and other issues just as there were following 9/11.
By the same measure, a false dichotomy is being established by political
gatekeepers in order to silence those who dare challenge the official
account as to how the coronavirus began. It is a stigmatization that is
all too familiar to those who have never believed the conventional
narrative that 19 Arab hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden armed only
with box-cutters were solely responsible for the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon on that fateful day.
There is a common
misconception that to believe in so-called “conspiracy theories” is to
somehow lose sight of the bigger picture or systemic problems. Behind
this phenomenon is a mistakenly presumed conflict between understanding
the broader, overarching system versus the sinister motives of those in
power who administer it — when they are inextricably linked. Political
scientist Michael Parenti, who drew the ire of many of his fellow
left-wing colleagues for his work on the Kennedy assassination, refers to it in his lecture “Understanding Deep Politics” as a perceived incompatibility between “the structural and the functional.”
The anti-conspiracists wrongly assume that the more impersonal or wider
the lens, the more profound an analysis. By this logic, the elite are
absolved of conscious intent and deliberate pursuit of nefarious
self-interest, as if everything is done by incidental chance or out of
incompetence. Not to say efficacy applies without exception, but it has
become a required gesture to disassociate oneself from “conspiracies” to
maintain credibility — ironically even by those who are often the
target of such smears themselves.
This applies not
only to mainstream media and academics, but even leading progressive
figures who have a mechanical, unthinking resistance to assigning intent
or recognizing the existence of hidden agendas. As a result, it
disappears the class interests of the ruling elite and ultimately
assists them in providing cover for their crimes. With the exception of
the Kennedy assassination — coincidentally the subject of a new epic chart-topping song
by Bob Dylan — nowhere has there been more hostility to ‘conspiracism’
than regarding the events of 9/11. Just as they assailed Parenti, David
Talbot and others for challenging the Warren Commission’s ‘lone gunman’
theory, leading figures on the left such as Noam Chomsky and the late Alexander Cockburn
railed against the 9/11 Truth movement and today it is often wrongly
equated with right-wing politics, an unlikely trajectory given it
occurred under an arch-conservative administration but an inevitable
result of the pseudo-left’s aversion to “conspiracies.” If polls
are any indication, the average American certainly disagrees with such
elitist misleaders as to the believability of the sham 9/11 Commission
findings, yet another example of how out-of-touch the faux-left is with
ordinary people.
A more recent example was an article by left-wing journalist Ben Norton proclaiming that to call 9/11 a false flag or an “inside job” is “fundamentally a right-wing conspiracy”,
in complete disregard of the many dedicated truther activists on the
left since its inception. Norton insists the 9/11 attacks were simply
“blowback”, or an unintended consequence of previous U.S. foreign policy
support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets during
the 1980s which later gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Norton
argues “Al-Qaeda’s unofficial strategic alliance with the US eventually broke down”
resulting in 9/11 as retaliation, completely overlooking that
Washington was still supporting jihadist factions during the 1990s in
Bosnia (two of which would be alleged 9/11 hijackers) and Kosovo in the
Yugoslav wars against Serbia, even while the U.S. was ostensibly
pursuing bin Laden for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in
1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.
A 1997 Congressional document
by the Republican Policy Committee (RPC) throws light on how Washington
never discontinued its practice in Afghanistan of using jihadist
proxies to achieve its foreign policy goals in the Balkans. Although it
was a partisan GOP attack meant to discredit then-U.S. President Bill
Clinton, nevertheless the memo accurately presents how the U.S. had “turned Bosnia into a Militant Islamic Base”:
“In short, the Clinton administration’s policy of facilitating the delivery of arms to the Bosnian Muslims made it the de facto partner of an international network of governments and organizations pursuing their own agenda in Bosnia: the promotion of Islamic revolution in Europe. That network not only involves Iran but Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan (a key ally of Iran), and Turkey, together with front groups supposedly pursuing humanitarian and cultural activities. For example, one such group about which details have come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden , a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups…”
It was also in
Bosnia where a raid was conducted in 2002 by local police at the
Sarajevo branch of a Saudi-based purported charitable organization,
Benevolence International Foundation, which was discovered to be a front
for Al-Qaeda. Seized on the premises was a document, dubbed the “Golden Chain”,
which listed the major financial sponsors of the terrorist organization
to be numerous Saudi business and government figures, including some of
Osama bin Laden’s own brothers. By the 9/11 Commission Report’s own admission, this same fake Islamic charity “supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbia” at the same time as the CIA.
It cannot go
without mentioning that the common link between Al-Qaeda and subsequent
extremist groups like ISIS/Daesh and Boko Haram is the doctrine of
Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of Sunni Islam practiced in the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia and founded in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab,
the religious leader who formed an alliance with the founder of the
first Saudi state, Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants make up the
House of Saud royal family. The ultra-orthodox teachings of Wahhabism
were initially rejected in the Middle East but reestablished by British
colonialism which aligned with the Saud family in order to use their
intolerant strain of Islam to undermine the Ottoman empire in a
divide-and-conquer strategy. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1921, Winston Churchill admitted the Saudis to be “intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty.”
This did not
stop the British from supporting the House of Saud so long as it was in
the interest of Western imperialism, an unholy alliance which continues
to this day. However, U.S.-Saudi relations did come under scrutiny when
the infamous 28 redacted pages
of the December 2002 report of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence
Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September
11, 2001” conducted by the Senate and House Select Committees on
Intelligence were finally disclosed in 2016. The section revealed not
only the numerous U.S. intelligence failures in the lead-up to the
attacks but the long suspected culpability of Saudi Arabia, whose
nationals were not the focus of counterterrorism because of Riyadh’s
status as a U.S. ally. The declassified pages show that some of the
hijackers, 15 of them Saudi citizens, received financial and logistical
support from individuals linked to the Saudi government, which FBI
sources believed at least two of which to be Saudi intelligence
officers. One of those Saudi agents received large payments from
Princess Haifa, the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a stipend from the latter’s bank account which inevitably went from the go-betweens to the sleeper cell.
President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2002
A key member of
the House of Saud and then-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar
has such a long and close relationship to the Bush family he was given
the nickname “Bandar Bush.” For obvious reasons, when the congressional
joint inquiry report was first published in 2003, the 28-page portion on
the Saudi ties to the attacks was completely censored at the insistence
of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush family’s connection to the
Gulf state kingdom is not limited to the ruling monarchy but includes
one of the petrodollar theocracy’s other wealthiest families— the bin
Laden family itself. While Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 mostly whitewashed the real conspiracy of 9/11 , it
did reveal that numerous unquestioned members of the bin Laden family
were given special treatment and suspiciously evacuated on secret
flights out of the U.S. shortly after the attacks in coordination with
the Saudi government.
The Bush-bin
Laden connection goes all the way back to the beginning of George W.
Bush’s business career prior to his political involvement in 1976 with
the founding of an oil drilling company, Arbusto Energy, whose earliest
investors included a Texas businessman and fellow reservist in the Texas
Air National Guard, James R. Bath, who oddly enough was the American
liaison for Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half brother. To put it
differently, the bin Laden family and its construction fortune helped
finance Bush’s start in the oil industry, a relationship that would
continue through the 1990s with Harken Energy, later the recipient of an
offshore oil contract in Iraq’s reconstruction alongside Dick Cheney’s
Halliburton. The Bush dynasty’s financial ties to both the Saudi royals
and bin Laden family went on as co-investors in the Carlyle Group
private equity firm where the elder Bush’s previous government service
contacts were exploited for financial gain. In fact, on the morning of
9/11, Bush Sr. just happened to be attending a Carlyle business
conference where another bin Laden sibling was the guest of honor in
what we are supposed to believe is another astounding coincidence. Just
days later, Shafiq bin Laden would be spirited off on a chartered flight
back to Saudi Arabia in an exodus overseen by Prince Bandar himself.
Osama bin Laden
himself also got an evacuation of sorts when the U.S. invaded
Afghanistan in 2001. It was legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Seymour Hersh who first reported
that bin Laden and thousands of other Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters
were suspiciously allowed to escape to Pakistan in an evacuation dubbed
the ‘airlift of evil.’ This was corroborated in a leaked 2009 Hillary
Clinton State Department email
published by WikiLeaks regarding a Senate report on the Battle of Tora
Bora and bin Laden’s escape where Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal is
shown discussing the controversial airlift as having been requested by
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and approved by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — but don’t dare
call it a conspiracy:
“Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIA armed operation in eastern Afghanistan, is a major source for the report. I am in contact with him and have heard his entire story at length, key parts of which are not in his book, Jawbreaker, or in the Senate report. In particular , the story of the Kunduz airlift of the bulk of key AQ and Taliban leaders, at the request of Musharaf and per order Cheney/Rumsfeld, is absent.”
Could it have anything to do with just a few years earlier the Taliban visiting Texas when
Bush was Governor to discuss with the Unocal Corporation the
construction of a gas pipeline through Afghanistan into Pakistan? It is
also well known that the Pakistani government and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI)
had supported the Taliban for decades and during the 1980s had been the
CIA’s main conduit for supplying arms to the Afghan mujahideen,
including bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Maktab al-Khidamat, the
organizational precursor to Al-Qaeda. As shown in the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, little in their relations changed in the years between the Afghan-Soviet war and 9/11, as ISI director Mahmud Ahmed was reportedly busted wiring $100,000 to alleged hijacker ringleader Mohamed Atta
not long before the WTC attacks. Throughout 2001 both before and after
9/11, General Ahmed had repeatedly visited the U.S. and met with top
Pentagon and Bush administration officials, including CIA Director
George Tenet, making Prince Bandar not the only figure to have been
caught financing the operation and where a direct line can be drawn
between the White House and the hijackers.
While Bandar has thus far eluded justice, one year after the release of the 28 pages a lawsuit
was filed on behalf of the families of the victims against the
government of Saudi Arabia which presented new evidence that two years
prior to the attacks in 1999, the Saudi Embassy paid for the flights of
two Saudi agents living undercover in the U.S. to fly from Phoenix to
Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks” where they
attempted to breach the cockpit and test flight security. This means the
Saudi government was likely involved in planning the attacks from the
very beginning, in addition to providing the subsidies and patsy
hijacker personnel for the smokescreen of blaming Al-Qaeda and making
bin Laden the fall guy, whose links to 9/11 are tenuous at best. After
all, the “confession” from supposed planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was
extracted only after his being water-boarded 183 times while bin Laden himself initially denied any role in the attacks before questionable videos were released of his admittance.
The Saudi
nationals who participated in the hijacking rehearsal were posing as
students. However, the Sunni dictatorship was not the only country
conducting a mass espionage operation in the U.S. prior to 9/11 under
such a front. In the first half of 2001, several U.S. federal law
enforcement agencies documented more than 130 different instances of young Israelis impersonating “art students”
while aggressively trying to penetrate the security of various
government and military facilities as part of a Mossad spy ring. Several
of the Israelis were found to be living in locations within the near
vicinity of the hijackers as if they were eavesdropping on them. The
discovery of the Israeli operation raised many questions, namely whether
Mossad had advanced knowledge or involvement in 9/11. Ironically, Fox News of all places was one of the few outlets to cover the story in a four-part series which never re-aired and was eventually scrubbed from the network website.
The Israeli “art student” mystery never gained traction in the rest of the media, much like another suspicious case in the “Dancing Israelis”,
a smaller group of Mossad spies posing as furnishing movers who were
arrested in New Jersey on the morning of 9/11 taking celebratory
pictures with the twin towers burning in the background of the Manhattan
skyline. The five men were not only physically present at the
waterfront prior to the first plane impact but found with thousands of
dollars in cash, box-cutters, fake passports, and Arab clothing after
they were reported for suspicious behavior and intercepted at the
Lincoln tunnel heading into Manhattan. Initially misreported as Arabs by
the media, the men were connected to Mossad by an FBI database and held
for five months before their deportation to Israel while the owner of
the front moving company fled to Jerusalem before further questioning.
It should be noted that if Israel were to have participated in a ‘false
flag’ attack on the U.S., it would not have been the first time. During
the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli Air Force and Navy launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty,
a U.S. Navy spy ship that was surveilling the Arab-Israeli conflict
from international waters in the Mediterranean, an “accidental” assault
which killed 34 Americans in an attempt to blame Egypt and provoke U.S.
intervention.
If Israel turned
out to be co-conspirators with the Saudis, it too is not as unlikely a
scenario as it may seem. Wrongly assumed to be sworn enemies, it is an
open secret that the two British-created states have maintained a
historical covert alliance since the end of World War I
when the first monarch of the modern Saudi state, King Abdulaziz Ibn
Saud, defeated his rival the Sharif of Mecca who opposed the Balfour
Declaration. Authored by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour and
presented to Zionist leader Baron Rothschild, the 1917 letter guaranteed
a Jewish homeland in Palestine by colonization with European Jews. Once
Sharif was out the way, the Zionist movement had the green light to
move forward with its colonial project. Although Ibn Saud publicly
opposed Zionism, behind the scenes he negotiated with them through an
intermediary in his advisor, British agent St. John Philby, who proposed
a £20 million compensation to the Saudi king for delivering Palestine
to the Jews.
Ibn Saud communicated his willingness to compromise in a 1940 letter
from Philby to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist
Organization and later the first Israeli president. However, Philby
himself was an anti-Zionist and sabotaged the plan by leaking it
to other Arab leaders who voiced their vehement opposition and it was
only after this exposure that the Saudi king claimed to have turned down
the bribe, something the Zionists would only solicit if they thought he
would accept. Ever since, the ideologies of Saudi Wahhabism and Israeli
Zionism have been center to the West’s destabilization of the Middle
East which contrary to misperceptions was not uniquely plagued
by conflict historically more than the Occident until the West nurtured
Salafism and Zionism. Predictably, discussing either the Saudi or
Israeli role in 9/11 has been strictly forbidden in corporate media,
since both are among Washington’s geo-strategic allies and each hold
immense lobbying power over large media institutions.
Less than five
months after 9/11, Bush notoriously declared the nations of Iran, Iraq
and North Korea as comprising an “axis of evil” in his 2002 state of the
union address. In reality, the phrase is better suited to describe the
tripartite of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. government itself who
are likely the real trio of conspirators behind 9/11. The infamous
choice of words were attributed to neoconservative pundit and Bush
speechwriter, David Frum, who claimed to have taken inspiration from
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “a date that will live infamy” speech
given the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was
a continuation of a theme present in the manifesto of the
neoconservative cabal authored one year prior to 9/11 — “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
think tank, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush. The strategic military blueprint called for a
massive increase in U.S. defense spending in order to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”before ominously predicting:
“The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Ten members of
PNAC would be subsequently appointed to positions in the Bush White
House where their vision of a “new Pearl Harbor” conveniently
materialized. Then again, there is plenty of evidence that Pearl Harbor itself was a ‘false flag’, or that U.S. intelligence and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had foreknowledge of an impending Japanese attack on the naval base in Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. As pointed out by the film Loose Change, it
is probable that Roosevelt allowed it to happen on purpose in order to
win public support for a U.S. entry into the European theatre of World
War II, a move opposed by a majority of Americans prior to the
‘surprise’ Japanese attack. Given what is known about Pearl Harbor and
the abandoned Operation Northwoods,
which proposed both fabricating and committing terrorist attacks on
civilian aircraft to be pinned on Fidel Castro in order to justify a
U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1962, there are no grounds to assume that such
false flag operations were ever phased out of military procedure before
9/11 or since.
Loose Change also
made a useful historical analogy between 9/11 and the Reichstag fire,
the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building that occurred a
month after Adolf Hitler was inaugurated as Chancellor and pinned on a
24-year old half-blind Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe.
While there is no denying the incident was used a pretext by the Nazi
regime to consolidate power and suspend law and order, there is still a
heated debate between historians as to whether van der Lubbe was the
real culprit. However, it was coincidentally in 2001 when a group of
historians uncovered
evidence that a Nazi stormtrooper who died under mysterious
circumstances in 1933 had previously confessed to prosecutors that
members of Hitler’s Storm Detachment had set fire to the edifice under
orders from paramilitary leader Karl Ernst, lending credence to the
widely held suspicion that it was a Nazi-engineered ‘false flag’ all
along.
Most Americans
are unaware that a similar coup d’etat nearly took place during the same
year in the United States in an attempt to remove President Franklin D.
Roosevelt and install an authoritarian government modeled on Fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany as part of a scheme hatched by an inner circle of
right-wing bankers otherwise known as the the ‘Business Plot.’ It was a
conspiracy that only became public after it was heroically thwarted by a
whistleblower in decorated Marine Corps veteran turned
anti-imperialist, Major General Smedley Butler, after he was recruited
to form the junta. Incredibly, one of the prominent business figures
implicated in the putsch was none other than future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush,
George H.W. Bush’s father and George W. Bush’s grandfather, who at the
time was the director and shareholder of a bank owned by German
industrialist and prominent Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen seized by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
After his transformation, in 1935 Smedley Butler famously penned War is a Racket and
there is perhaps no better phrase that would sum up the so-called ‘War
on Terror’ today. Not only did the American Reichstag fire of 9/11
trigger a domestic police state transformation that overrode the U.S.
constitution in an American equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Act and the Heimatschutz (“homeland protection”)
defense forces with the passing of the USA-Patriot Act and founding of
the Department of Homeland Security, but it fulfilled the prophecy of
political scientist Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations in
a face-off between Islam and Christianity abroad. The prediction that
religion and culture would be the primary source of geopolitical
conflict in the post-Cold War world was an apocalyptic paradigm
envisioned by right-wing orientalist philosophers like Huntington and
Bernard Lewis which the PNAC neocon ideologues put into practice. Today,
the ongoing COVID-19 crisis appears likely to have similar broad and
long-term political, social and economic consequences and those who have
doubts about the official explanation for the pandemic can hardly be
blamed for their distrust given this history unless the lessons of 9/11
have gone unlearned.
*
Note to readers: please click the share
buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists.
Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Max Parry is an
independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has
appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
All images in this article are from The Unz Review
The original source of this article is The Unz Review
Copyright © Max Parry, The Unz Review, 2020
Comment on Global Research Articles on our Facebook page
Become a Member of Global Research
No comments:
Post a Comment