08-09-2009, 10:08 PM
The Irrefutable Case for 9/11 Truth
Understanding the context
The goal of the 9/11 Truth Movement (hererafter “TM”) is for there to be a criminal investigation into possible complicity by the US government in the attacks of that day. Consequently, the baseline proposition of the TM is, logically, that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in 9/11 to warrant such an investigation.
This distinction, one that is rarely made, is crucial, since it changes drastically the dynamic of most, if not all, of the debates that have been happening in the public domain about the subject. Given that the goal of the TM is one of illustrating evidence of a sufficiently significant gravity to warrant a criminal investigation, there are many “debunking” tactics that have absolutely no relevance any more. The idea that it is the role of the TM to prove the government’s guilt, for instance, is a common assertion that, with a moment’s reflection, is illustrated to be neither here nor there. It is not the duty of the TM to prove something so that it can then be proved. To state that there is an onus on the TM to prove the guilt of an accused party, regardless of whether it can or cannot, is as ridiculous as if one were to ask someone who is accusing someone else of murder to prove it, and only then can any criminal investigation into the murder take place. Since it is not the TM’s job to be judge jury and executioner, such arguments have no place.
A similar dynamic is true for another accusation, which is that the TM needs to construct an alternative scenario under which the attacks could have proceeded, one that is watertight, and covers all eventualities. This again, just shows a drastic misunderstanding the TM, and the entire dynamic of the debate. It is not the TM that is constructing an scenario to be defended- this is the job of the other side. They have drawn up a very intricate and improbable scenario that needs to be defended at every corner; a scenario that if there is one flaw, the whole tapestry comes crashing down. Though it is tempting to make hypotheses about who did what and when, this is something that I feel the TM should not get into too publicly, since it is not something that has any relevance. I don’t care who did what and when to WTC7, and the details are utterly irrelevant- all that matters is that I can show that there is sufficient evidence to illustrate that the government could have been criminally involved in its demise to warrant an investigation into such. That’s all I need to show, given the goal and baseline proposition of the TM as outlined at the top.
Furthermore, one of the most common retorts, “Yes, but maybe it was just a coincidence/built that way/an off day for NORAD…” again, no longer has any validity whatsoever. While it may well be that, for instance, military grade incendiaries got into the WTC dust by accident, the point is that this is a significant piece of evidence pointing to government complicity that needs to be part of a criminal investigation. Even the man with a smoking gun may have a genuine alibi, but does this mean that you do not perform a criminal investigation against him? Of course not. So the standards that are being demanded of the TM do not really represent a serious analysis of the situation on the part of any of its detractors.
A priori reasoning is also something that doesn’t hold. It is useless, logically speaking, to state, “It’s impossible, since there would have had to have been x thousand people involved”. Or, “Its impossible, since there’s no way a US government would do that to its own people”. Or, "Bush isn't smart enough to have pulled off such a complex plot- he couldn't even plant WMDs in Iraq". It is not a problem to employ such axioms if you can prove them to be axiomatic. But how can you do such a thing with the above 3 comments- 3 of the most common a priori rejoinders to any TM argument? Since none of them hold axiomatically, they cannot be employed as axioms. Thus any serious analysis of the situation would have to avoid such prima facie arguments.
Deductive vs. Cumulative reasoning
Structurally therefore, the position of the TM is one that is essentially impossible to refute. Given that there are probably around 100 different pieces of serious evidence that point to government complicity, the job of an opponent is not just to prove that they each might be wrong, as has been the stance until now, but that each of them stand so little chance of being right, that the sum total of all of the 100 or so accusations' probabilities of having actually occurred is lower than the probability necessary for the overall accusation to warrant criminal investigation. This becomes mathematically impossible. To take an example, if the chances that NORAD's inactivity was not indicative of criminal complicity on the behalf of the government were, for the sake of argument, ¾ and then you apply the same reasoning to just 20 arguments that the TM has proffered- very easy to list- then your combined probability of the weight of the evidence not being indicative of criminal complicity on the part of the government is 1/300. So in essence, the debunkers, once they have understood what the debate actually is, cannot but lose. This is because the arguments are structurally different. The TM argument relies on cumulative reasoning, which is to say that only one argument has to be true for the argument to carry. At the same time, the weight of the case is reflected by the combined probabilities of the total accusations. On the other hand, the government case is based on deductive reasoning, which means that only one element in the chain has to be wrong for the entire story to fold. If, for example, it was indeed the case that Dick Cheney told the young man in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center not to shoot the plane down, as Transport Secretary Norm Mineta intimated, then the entire rest of the government story (that is not contingent on that piece of the jigsaw of course) may well be true, but it would not make a bit of difference- the government story would be wrong, and criminal complicity would be proven. If one can illustrate that that piece of testimony is sufficiently serious that it deserves a criminal investigation, then the reasoning of the TM carries. And if you are not sure about that one piece, for whatever reason, then it is simply a matter of numbers, since there are so many serious accusations of holes in the government story, that the combined probability of these accusations makes any acceptance of the need for criminal enquiry essentially impossible to hold off.
The need to rebuild America's defences
To look at how this works in detail, let us what I feel to be one of the strongest examples, and that is the policy statements of the neo-conservatice think tank, the Project for a New American Century. Now one thing that startles me about 9/11, is that if it is so simple for an amateur pilot to hijack a plane and fly it into the Pentagon, one of the most secure buildings in the world, well then why don’t terrorists fly planes into less secure buildings- surely this should be easier? Why don’t Algerian terrorists fly into the Algerian Parliament building, or some other such building? Why don’t Sri Lankan terrorists fly into an important building in Sri Lanka? These buildings do not have a fraction of the protection of the Pentagon- why has it so far proved impossible to pull off? Why has this never happened in the history of mankind, given that on one day it occurred with relative ease, on not one, but 3 such buildings? The simple answer is that even in a tinpot security infrastructure, pulling off such an attack is very hard to do. So how did it happen in the US? In our quest for an answer to that question, it is useful to start with the neo-conservative policy white paper that was published in September 2000, exactly 1 year prior to the attacks. The document is called “Rebuilding America’s Defences".
Basically speaking, this document, signed by a significant number of the men and women who would be charged with defending the US from a catastrophic terror attack on and up to 9/11, detailed that such an attack would in fact be propitious to US policy. This is because the document cites the need to create a new paradigm that will allow for a decades long shift in military and strategic radicalisation. With the threat of the Cold War gone, the US can no longer rest on its laurels as it did under Clinton- it needed to invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam, develop the capacity to fight 2 major wars at the same time, utilise space as a defence mechanism, utilise cyberspace as a defence mechanism, secure radical upheavals in defence spending etc. This, it stated, would be very hard to achieve “absent a catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbor”. Now given that such an event is close to impossible to occurring in a country with a tinpot security infrastructure like Sri Lanka or Algeria, the chances that it should happen within a trillion dollar security infrastructure, like the US, without government involvement, moreover when the same government- in fact the people charged with preventing such an attack within said government- had effectively advocated such an occurrence only 12 months prior, are very slim indeed. So the case against the TM, bearing in mind our precisions about burdens of proof necessary as stated at the top, is already looking pretty tough. What the administration did when it came to power- the lengths the administration went to to secure its election victory of Gore in 2000 now making more sense- was, within 6 days, to demote the main guy who was charged with preventing a terror attack who was not one of them- head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke. He was demoted, incidentally, one day after handing Condaleeza Rice a document entitled “Strategies for eliminating the threat of Al Qaeda”. And this 3 months after the bombing of the USS Cole, by Al Qaeda. As has been outlined in overwhelming detail by Paul Thompson, this pattern of warnings being ignored, and safeguards against threats being defused, was very much par for the course on a regular basis leading up to the attacks. Even the 9/11 Commission Report states that Bush was given 40 Presidential Daily Briefs that warned him that Al Qaeda was plotting to attack the US. 40 times he did nothing. We are told that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, stated that the threat level was “unprecedented”, and that he was running around “with his hair on fire”. And yet nothing was done in response. There is only so far that apathy can go before it ceases to become something passive and transforms into something active, and there is one evident way to explain the active apathy of the Bush administration prior to 9/11 faced with daily warnings of a catastrophic terror attack against them- and that is, as we know, that the occurrence of such an attack was effectively openly stated policy. Once viewed in this light, the insouciance becomes perfectly normal, and things make sense again. Otherwise there is no explanation why an administration made up of some of the most hawkish figures in recent American political history, would not violently react to the idea that there was anything threatening national security- a rare legitimate use of the term.
Let's just pull back for a second and analyse this data in the light of our earlier expounded framework of reasoning. It could well be the case that the pieces of evidence I have cited do indeed lead nowhere. It could well be that it was just a coincidence that a once in a lifetime event should occur 12 months after it was more or less wished for by the people- undeniably ruthless and unscrupulous people at that- who were in a position to make it happen. This I don’t deny. But it's irrelevant. The point is that one cannot look at that evidence and state that this is not sufficiently indicative of criminal complicity to warrant an investigation into such. That cannot be said, in any serious way. And this is merely one of dozens of such pieces of evidence.
World Trade Center 7
It is a remarkable truth, that still so few people are aware of how many buildings fell on 9/11. It is the most rudimentary fact concerning the most reported on event of all time, and so few people know this. The fact is that not 2, but 3 skyscrapers collapsed on that day, the Twin Towers (World Trade Centers 1 and 2) and World Trade Center 7, a 47 story building 100 metres away from the twin towers that collapsed at around 17:20 on the same day. It contained the offices of Salomon Brothers Bank, as well as those of the CIA, the Secret Service, the IRS, the SEC, as well as the Mayor’s Emergency Command Center.
Shortly after the planes hit the towers, the entire WTC 7 was evacuated. Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, 2 high level city bureaucrats, happened to enter the Mayor’s Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor, found it deserted, and were told by emergency staff to leave the building. On their way down, there was an explosion within the building that blew up part of the 6th floor. This was, according to Jennings, a significant time before either Twin Tower had collapsed. They made their way down to the ground floor, where Jennings describes how it was “in total ruins”, as if from explosions, and saying that in the lobby, he was told “not to look down” by a firefighter, and that, walking through the lobby, he was “stepping over people”- the suggestion being, of course, dead people.
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Jennings was interviewed for the excellent Loose Change Final Cut, but then asked for his testimony to be removed, due to threats he was receiving, and the shortly after, being interviewed for the BBC Conspiracy files debunking attempt, he reneged on his testimony. Shortly after that he was dead, in his early-mid 50’s.
The events he relayed all happened in the morning of 9/11. The building collapsed later in the day. There is, in fact, little need to go into the specifics of something so simple- watch the collapse for yourself, and you can witness that it is as much of a controlled demolition as you are likely to see.
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The official explanation of the building’s demise, initially evaluated by FEMA as having “a low probability of occurrence” is that due to the fires that were set off by falling debris from the twin towers, and the water supply being cut off for the firefighters, the metal beams in the building underwent “thermal expansion”, making the building unsteady, and causing its collapse. Were this explanation one taken seriously by even its formulators, there is something very evident that we would see, namely a revision of fire and building codes for skyscrapers all over the world, since if a fire can cause a building to collapse at the speed of gravity, we had better all go and work in bungalows. Since this is not a serious explanation, there have been no such revisions that I am aware of anywhere in the world- the notion that a fire can cause a building to collapse on itself in the manner of WTC7 is clearly not one that makes any sense.
More sense is provided by first responder witnesses to the collapse. Along with Craig Bartmer, Kevin Mcpadden who was one of the first responders that day, gives testimony that is devastating to the official story, stating that there was a countdown leading up to the collapse of the building.
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First responder Indira Singh also states that they were told to evacuate the area, since with regards to WTC7, “(they) were going to have to bring it down".
In an interview with an emergency worker broadcast on local radio on 9/11 just after 7 collapsed, we hear that “We heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder, we turn around and were shocked to see that the building was... ah well....it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through he building and the windows were all busted out... About a second later the bottom floor collapsed and the building followed after that." Doesn’t sound too much like “thermal expansion”, but such testimonies were never made the subject of any serious media coverage, to say nothing of any official enquiry. Nonetheless, they are devastating to any support for the official version of events.
To add further fuel to the fire, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center complex, Larry Silverstein, who had purchased the lease weeks prior to the attacks, interviewed for a PBS special on the attacks, stated the following:
“I remember getting a call from the Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, I said, you know, we’ve had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is, pull it. They made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse”
Now, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding by both sides of the debate surrounding this comment. Some members of the TM initially stated that “to pull” is industry jargon for “to implode”, which is not correct. Opponents of the TM sided with Silverstein’s later clarification attempt, when he put out a statement saying that by “pull”, he meant in fact “pull the firemen out of the building”. The debate has centred around the first interpretation, which is, in my eyes, totally misguided- given that Silverstein is not a demolition professional, the idea that he would be using demolition jargon, especially in a reported conversation with a fireman, for a public television show, is not very well thought through. The position from which one should be interpreting this comment, is that of a layperson- i.e. a non demolition industry insider, since this is the standpoint from which Silverstein is coming. If such a person were to hear, or indeed make that comment, it is fairly clear what their interpretation of it would be- that the building was brought down intentionally, by one means or another. Hence the consecutive nature of “making the decision to pull- watching the building collapse”. There is only one thing that pull could be referring to, realistically, and it certainly is not firemen. So Silverstein’s comment, when analysed intelligently, is another piece of evidence indicating insider complicity in the attacks.
This is not to state, as I have emphasised above, that the evidence given rules out all possibility of an alternative explanation. It may well have been the first time in history that a building collapsed by fire, while coincidentally exploding on the inside and its owner subsequently making suspect comments as to its demise; but it is this very fact that renders the probability of its veracity so unlikely, and screams for the need for an investigation into the attacks.
Very often, people point to official reports as support for their argument that the government was not involved. This is clearly erroneous, as since the government is the entity that is suspected of misdemeanour, pointing to a report issued by one of its agencies that defends its point of view is not an impartial way of viewing things. A useful thought experiment to do if one wants to analyse the situation impartially, is to consider if this event had happened in the country of a “designated enemy”, say Iran, and a building containing its secret service and other secretive agencies had collapsed in the same manner as WTC7, with the same background and motives for the attacks as the US had for 9/11, and what our reaction would be when Iranian government scientists came out and said that no, there is no conspiracy, nothing to see here. People just wouldn’t take it seriously. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and it is us who are the potential suspects, a government agency's defence of the government is seen as being something representing serious academic rigour. This is a level of double standards that needs to be bypassed if any progress is to be made in our analysis of such situations. One prima facie refutation that is often given cited above is that the US Government would never kill its own people. But it is not a stretch to believe that the US government would kill 3,000 of its own for imperial grand strategy. After Hurricane Katrina, it is widely accepted that government apathy in the face of spending money to save poor black people led to the death of close to 2,000 there. So if that is accepted to be the case, is it really inconceivable that they would engineer the deaths of a similar number to ensure lasting power and hegemony for the foreseeable future? Not at all. We are aware that the US will willingly sacrifice lives of millions of foreign civilians, and thousands of its own military, to ensure its own global power, so when viewed in this light, and in the stark light of events in New Orleans, it becomes hard to accept the idea that 9/11 is indeed a step that the US Government would not go beyond.
The financing of the attacks
The attacks, according to the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission Report, Tom Kean, cost $4-500,000 to carry out. A critical question therefore, though Kean inexplicably deemed it to be "of little practical significance", is where did this money come from. As has been reported in The Guardian, The Times of India, Asia Times, as well as the Wall Stree Journal, the Australian, and other media outlets from France to India, Indian Intelligence were informed by the FBI that $100,000 of this came from Mahmoud Ahmed, who was the head of the ISI- the Pakistani Intelligence Service- via renowned terrorist Saeed Sheikh. In any normal circumstances, Ahmed would surely be living in hiding having been labelled as a sponsor of state terrorism. But this is not the case. Ahmed, the man who is widely reported to have financed 20-25% of the worst ever terrorist attack on the US, spent the week of those attacks in Washington, meeting with senior government and intelligence officials of the country whose people he was helping to attack. This included breakfasting on the morning of 9/11 with Porter Goss and Bob Graham, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as meetings with George Tenet, the Director of the CIAon the 9th September.
Given the historical links between the CIA and the ISI, going back to US rapprochement with China under Nixon-Kissinger, and then the adding to the equation of the Taliban during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, it is unsurprising that revelations should surface linking the CIA and the ISI to attacks that are purported to have come out of Afghanistan. What is manna from heaven from anyone suspecting government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, is that such a link should have been made so explicit, with such wide reports regarding the financing, and then such an obvious connection manifested between the financer and US intelligence. Once more, if we apply these inputs to the framework of reasoning that is outlined above, the case for 9/11 Truth becomes increasingly hard to reject.
Some of the other issues
As stated at the top, the strucural strength of the movement comes from the fact that there are so many areas of improbability in the government report, and only one of them has to turn out to be false and indicative of government complicity for the TM argument to carry. Due to this nature of the argument, I will not be able to list all of the issues in this piece, but an excellent list of 50 key points is provided here by Jon Gold.
Conclusion
If we return to our original proposition, which is that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in the attack, I think it is hard to conceive that even given the limited number of instances I have been able to look at into depth here (given time and space considerations), that this is not the case. This is not at all to say that there is not a conceivable scenario under which the government’s story could hold. As I have been at pains to underscore, the validity of the TM’s case is not contingent on it offering judge, jury and executioner proof of the guilt of the US Government in the attacks. This is the job of an official investigative body, whose pursuits will be catalysed by the evidence that the TM is, and has been able to bring to light. The job of the TM, and one that has been rendered very easy, given the evident facts of the day, is simply to illustrate the instances that point to likely criminal conduct on the part of the US Government. This serves as the basis for an investigation to be conducted.
Engaging in belief and understanding
The reaction of many people I meet to whom I explain some of these basic facts, is one of what I would call disengaged belief. That’s to say that they understand the facts, they are convinced by them, but the engagement in the belief is not there. This fact also explains the discrepancy between poll numbers- which show that around 40% of Americans are convinced by the TM’s overall case- and the fact that such numbers are not out on the street in open revolt against what they have understood to be their criminal government. To actually engage in the belief means to fully comprehend its implications. It means to fully comprehend the nature of government, industry and other power centres, and the lengths to which these entities will go to to preserve their own power. It would mean the drastic reevaluation of the images that we see on television and the internet of the leaders that we elect, and an utterly unpalatable realisation of our own implication and responsibility in the crimes our government commits. Such a radical reevaluation of world affairs is difficult for almost all people to swallow. As J Edgar Hoover said, “The individual is handicapped confronted with a conspiracy so monstrous, he cannot believe it exists”. This was precisely the phenomenon he was referring to. What handicaps the individual is the dichotomy between his current world view where leaders and power centres are essentially benign, if occasionally misbehaving individuals, and a reality where such “monstrous” conspiracies, implemented to further the true interests of power centres, are possible, logical, and do happen. They are indeed all the more likely to happen given the handicap of general members of the public, and their inability to engage in their belief in a monstrous conspiracy. It is just simple fact that if 40% of the US, 120 million people, engaged in their belief that the government needs to be investigated for possible criminal connections to 9/11, life in that country would become unrecognisable- precisely what it must become if justice is to be served. It is essential that when reading this article, the belief that gets engendered must be engaged upon- it is no use just believing it and setting it aside, and becoming another one of the 120 million who believes, but does not act. If you do this, you become part of Hoover’s handicapped public, that allows for future conspiracies to unfurl. This in turn allows for future murders, wars, and repressions. The issue of government connivance in the murder of 3,000 of its own citizens to launch a fraudulent war, the War on Terror, is not one that needs to be explained. Engage in the belief, actively demand a new investigation, and that way, not only will you be on the side of justice for the over 1 million who have died as a result of that day, but you will be involved in the effort to make such an catastrophic event less likely in the future.
35 embedded links and three embedded videos at
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21148
Understanding the context
The goal of the 9/11 Truth Movement (hererafter “TM”) is for there to be a criminal investigation into possible complicity by the US government in the attacks of that day. Consequently, the baseline proposition of the TM is, logically, that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in 9/11 to warrant such an investigation.
This distinction, one that is rarely made, is crucial, since it changes drastically the dynamic of most, if not all, of the debates that have been happening in the public domain about the subject. Given that the goal of the TM is one of illustrating evidence of a sufficiently significant gravity to warrant a criminal investigation, there are many “debunking” tactics that have absolutely no relevance any more. The idea that it is the role of the TM to prove the government’s guilt, for instance, is a common assertion that, with a moment’s reflection, is illustrated to be neither here nor there. It is not the duty of the TM to prove something so that it can then be proved. To state that there is an onus on the TM to prove the guilt of an accused party, regardless of whether it can or cannot, is as ridiculous as if one were to ask someone who is accusing someone else of murder to prove it, and only then can any criminal investigation into the murder take place. Since it is not the TM’s job to be judge jury and executioner, such arguments have no place.
A similar dynamic is true for another accusation, which is that the TM needs to construct an alternative scenario under which the attacks could have proceeded, one that is watertight, and covers all eventualities. This again, just shows a drastic misunderstanding the TM, and the entire dynamic of the debate. It is not the TM that is constructing an scenario to be defended- this is the job of the other side. They have drawn up a very intricate and improbable scenario that needs to be defended at every corner; a scenario that if there is one flaw, the whole tapestry comes crashing down. Though it is tempting to make hypotheses about who did what and when, this is something that I feel the TM should not get into too publicly, since it is not something that has any relevance. I don’t care who did what and when to WTC7, and the details are utterly irrelevant- all that matters is that I can show that there is sufficient evidence to illustrate that the government could have been criminally involved in its demise to warrant an investigation into such. That’s all I need to show, given the goal and baseline proposition of the TM as outlined at the top.
Furthermore, one of the most common retorts, “Yes, but maybe it was just a coincidence/built that way/an off day for NORAD…” again, no longer has any validity whatsoever. While it may well be that, for instance, military grade incendiaries got into the WTC dust by accident, the point is that this is a significant piece of evidence pointing to government complicity that needs to be part of a criminal investigation. Even the man with a smoking gun may have a genuine alibi, but does this mean that you do not perform a criminal investigation against him? Of course not. So the standards that are being demanded of the TM do not really represent a serious analysis of the situation on the part of any of its detractors.
A priori reasoning is also something that doesn’t hold. It is useless, logically speaking, to state, “It’s impossible, since there would have had to have been x thousand people involved”. Or, “Its impossible, since there’s no way a US government would do that to its own people”. Or, "Bush isn't smart enough to have pulled off such a complex plot- he couldn't even plant WMDs in Iraq". It is not a problem to employ such axioms if you can prove them to be axiomatic. But how can you do such a thing with the above 3 comments- 3 of the most common a priori rejoinders to any TM argument? Since none of them hold axiomatically, they cannot be employed as axioms. Thus any serious analysis of the situation would have to avoid such prima facie arguments.
Deductive vs. Cumulative reasoning
Structurally therefore, the position of the TM is one that is essentially impossible to refute. Given that there are probably around 100 different pieces of serious evidence that point to government complicity, the job of an opponent is not just to prove that they each might be wrong, as has been the stance until now, but that each of them stand so little chance of being right, that the sum total of all of the 100 or so accusations' probabilities of having actually occurred is lower than the probability necessary for the overall accusation to warrant criminal investigation. This becomes mathematically impossible. To take an example, if the chances that NORAD's inactivity was not indicative of criminal complicity on the behalf of the government were, for the sake of argument, ¾ and then you apply the same reasoning to just 20 arguments that the TM has proffered- very easy to list- then your combined probability of the weight of the evidence not being indicative of criminal complicity on the part of the government is 1/300. So in essence, the debunkers, once they have understood what the debate actually is, cannot but lose. This is because the arguments are structurally different. The TM argument relies on cumulative reasoning, which is to say that only one argument has to be true for the argument to carry. At the same time, the weight of the case is reflected by the combined probabilities of the total accusations. On the other hand, the government case is based on deductive reasoning, which means that only one element in the chain has to be wrong for the entire story to fold. If, for example, it was indeed the case that Dick Cheney told the young man in the Presidential Emergency Operating Center not to shoot the plane down, as Transport Secretary Norm Mineta intimated, then the entire rest of the government story (that is not contingent on that piece of the jigsaw of course) may well be true, but it would not make a bit of difference- the government story would be wrong, and criminal complicity would be proven. If one can illustrate that that piece of testimony is sufficiently serious that it deserves a criminal investigation, then the reasoning of the TM carries. And if you are not sure about that one piece, for whatever reason, then it is simply a matter of numbers, since there are so many serious accusations of holes in the government story, that the combined probability of these accusations makes any acceptance of the need for criminal enquiry essentially impossible to hold off.
The need to rebuild America's defences
To look at how this works in detail, let us what I feel to be one of the strongest examples, and that is the policy statements of the neo-conservatice think tank, the Project for a New American Century. Now one thing that startles me about 9/11, is that if it is so simple for an amateur pilot to hijack a plane and fly it into the Pentagon, one of the most secure buildings in the world, well then why don’t terrorists fly planes into less secure buildings- surely this should be easier? Why don’t Algerian terrorists fly into the Algerian Parliament building, or some other such building? Why don’t Sri Lankan terrorists fly into an important building in Sri Lanka? These buildings do not have a fraction of the protection of the Pentagon- why has it so far proved impossible to pull off? Why has this never happened in the history of mankind, given that on one day it occurred with relative ease, on not one, but 3 such buildings? The simple answer is that even in a tinpot security infrastructure, pulling off such an attack is very hard to do. So how did it happen in the US? In our quest for an answer to that question, it is useful to start with the neo-conservative policy white paper that was published in September 2000, exactly 1 year prior to the attacks. The document is called “Rebuilding America’s Defences".
Basically speaking, this document, signed by a significant number of the men and women who would be charged with defending the US from a catastrophic terror attack on and up to 9/11, detailed that such an attack would in fact be propitious to US policy. This is because the document cites the need to create a new paradigm that will allow for a decades long shift in military and strategic radicalisation. With the threat of the Cold War gone, the US can no longer rest on its laurels as it did under Clinton- it needed to invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam, develop the capacity to fight 2 major wars at the same time, utilise space as a defence mechanism, utilise cyberspace as a defence mechanism, secure radical upheavals in defence spending etc. This, it stated, would be very hard to achieve “absent a catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbor”. Now given that such an event is close to impossible to occurring in a country with a tinpot security infrastructure like Sri Lanka or Algeria, the chances that it should happen within a trillion dollar security infrastructure, like the US, without government involvement, moreover when the same government- in fact the people charged with preventing such an attack within said government- had effectively advocated such an occurrence only 12 months prior, are very slim indeed. So the case against the TM, bearing in mind our precisions about burdens of proof necessary as stated at the top, is already looking pretty tough. What the administration did when it came to power- the lengths the administration went to to secure its election victory of Gore in 2000 now making more sense- was, within 6 days, to demote the main guy who was charged with preventing a terror attack who was not one of them- head of counter terrorism, Richard Clarke. He was demoted, incidentally, one day after handing Condaleeza Rice a document entitled “Strategies for eliminating the threat of Al Qaeda”. And this 3 months after the bombing of the USS Cole, by Al Qaeda. As has been outlined in overwhelming detail by Paul Thompson, this pattern of warnings being ignored, and safeguards against threats being defused, was very much par for the course on a regular basis leading up to the attacks. Even the 9/11 Commission Report states that Bush was given 40 Presidential Daily Briefs that warned him that Al Qaeda was plotting to attack the US. 40 times he did nothing. We are told that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, stated that the threat level was “unprecedented”, and that he was running around “with his hair on fire”. And yet nothing was done in response. There is only so far that apathy can go before it ceases to become something passive and transforms into something active, and there is one evident way to explain the active apathy of the Bush administration prior to 9/11 faced with daily warnings of a catastrophic terror attack against them- and that is, as we know, that the occurrence of such an attack was effectively openly stated policy. Once viewed in this light, the insouciance becomes perfectly normal, and things make sense again. Otherwise there is no explanation why an administration made up of some of the most hawkish figures in recent American political history, would not violently react to the idea that there was anything threatening national security- a rare legitimate use of the term.
Let's just pull back for a second and analyse this data in the light of our earlier expounded framework of reasoning. It could well be the case that the pieces of evidence I have cited do indeed lead nowhere. It could well be that it was just a coincidence that a once in a lifetime event should occur 12 months after it was more or less wished for by the people- undeniably ruthless and unscrupulous people at that- who were in a position to make it happen. This I don’t deny. But it's irrelevant. The point is that one cannot look at that evidence and state that this is not sufficiently indicative of criminal complicity to warrant an investigation into such. That cannot be said, in any serious way. And this is merely one of dozens of such pieces of evidence.
World Trade Center 7
It is a remarkable truth, that still so few people are aware of how many buildings fell on 9/11. It is the most rudimentary fact concerning the most reported on event of all time, and so few people know this. The fact is that not 2, but 3 skyscrapers collapsed on that day, the Twin Towers (World Trade Centers 1 and 2) and World Trade Center 7, a 47 story building 100 metres away from the twin towers that collapsed at around 17:20 on the same day. It contained the offices of Salomon Brothers Bank, as well as those of the CIA, the Secret Service, the IRS, the SEC, as well as the Mayor’s Emergency Command Center.
Shortly after the planes hit the towers, the entire WTC 7 was evacuated. Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, 2 high level city bureaucrats, happened to enter the Mayor’s Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor, found it deserted, and were told by emergency staff to leave the building. On their way down, there was an explosion within the building that blew up part of the 6th floor. This was, according to Jennings, a significant time before either Twin Tower had collapsed. They made their way down to the ground floor, where Jennings describes how it was “in total ruins”, as if from explosions, and saying that in the lobby, he was told “not to look down” by a firefighter, and that, walking through the lobby, he was “stepping over people”- the suggestion being, of course, dead people.
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Jennings was interviewed for the excellent Loose Change Final Cut, but then asked for his testimony to be removed, due to threats he was receiving, and the shortly after, being interviewed for the BBC Conspiracy files debunking attempt, he reneged on his testimony. Shortly after that he was dead, in his early-mid 50’s.
The events he relayed all happened in the morning of 9/11. The building collapsed later in the day. There is, in fact, little need to go into the specifics of something so simple- watch the collapse for yourself, and you can witness that it is as much of a controlled demolition as you are likely to see.
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The official explanation of the building’s demise, initially evaluated by FEMA as having “a low probability of occurrence” is that due to the fires that were set off by falling debris from the twin towers, and the water supply being cut off for the firefighters, the metal beams in the building underwent “thermal expansion”, making the building unsteady, and causing its collapse. Were this explanation one taken seriously by even its formulators, there is something very evident that we would see, namely a revision of fire and building codes for skyscrapers all over the world, since if a fire can cause a building to collapse at the speed of gravity, we had better all go and work in bungalows. Since this is not a serious explanation, there have been no such revisions that I am aware of anywhere in the world- the notion that a fire can cause a building to collapse on itself in the manner of WTC7 is clearly not one that makes any sense.
More sense is provided by first responder witnesses to the collapse. Along with Craig Bartmer, Kevin Mcpadden who was one of the first responders that day, gives testimony that is devastating to the official story, stating that there was a countdown leading up to the collapse of the building.
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First responder Indira Singh also states that they were told to evacuate the area, since with regards to WTC7, “(they) were going to have to bring it down".
In an interview with an emergency worker broadcast on local radio on 9/11 just after 7 collapsed, we hear that “We heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder, we turn around and were shocked to see that the building was... ah well....it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through he building and the windows were all busted out... About a second later the bottom floor collapsed and the building followed after that." Doesn’t sound too much like “thermal expansion”, but such testimonies were never made the subject of any serious media coverage, to say nothing of any official enquiry. Nonetheless, they are devastating to any support for the official version of events.
To add further fuel to the fire, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center complex, Larry Silverstein, who had purchased the lease weeks prior to the attacks, interviewed for a PBS special on the attacks, stated the following:
“I remember getting a call from the Fire Department Commander, telling me that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, I said, you know, we’ve had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is, pull it. They made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse”
Now, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding by both sides of the debate surrounding this comment. Some members of the TM initially stated that “to pull” is industry jargon for “to implode”, which is not correct. Opponents of the TM sided with Silverstein’s later clarification attempt, when he put out a statement saying that by “pull”, he meant in fact “pull the firemen out of the building”. The debate has centred around the first interpretation, which is, in my eyes, totally misguided- given that Silverstein is not a demolition professional, the idea that he would be using demolition jargon, especially in a reported conversation with a fireman, for a public television show, is not very well thought through. The position from which one should be interpreting this comment, is that of a layperson- i.e. a non demolition industry insider, since this is the standpoint from which Silverstein is coming. If such a person were to hear, or indeed make that comment, it is fairly clear what their interpretation of it would be- that the building was brought down intentionally, by one means or another. Hence the consecutive nature of “making the decision to pull- watching the building collapse”. There is only one thing that pull could be referring to, realistically, and it certainly is not firemen. So Silverstein’s comment, when analysed intelligently, is another piece of evidence indicating insider complicity in the attacks.
This is not to state, as I have emphasised above, that the evidence given rules out all possibility of an alternative explanation. It may well have been the first time in history that a building collapsed by fire, while coincidentally exploding on the inside and its owner subsequently making suspect comments as to its demise; but it is this very fact that renders the probability of its veracity so unlikely, and screams for the need for an investigation into the attacks.
Very often, people point to official reports as support for their argument that the government was not involved. This is clearly erroneous, as since the government is the entity that is suspected of misdemeanour, pointing to a report issued by one of its agencies that defends its point of view is not an impartial way of viewing things. A useful thought experiment to do if one wants to analyse the situation impartially, is to consider if this event had happened in the country of a “designated enemy”, say Iran, and a building containing its secret service and other secretive agencies had collapsed in the same manner as WTC7, with the same background and motives for the attacks as the US had for 9/11, and what our reaction would be when Iranian government scientists came out and said that no, there is no conspiracy, nothing to see here. People just wouldn’t take it seriously. Yet when the shoe is on the other foot, and it is us who are the potential suspects, a government agency's defence of the government is seen as being something representing serious academic rigour. This is a level of double standards that needs to be bypassed if any progress is to be made in our analysis of such situations. One prima facie refutation that is often given cited above is that the US Government would never kill its own people. But it is not a stretch to believe that the US government would kill 3,000 of its own for imperial grand strategy. After Hurricane Katrina, it is widely accepted that government apathy in the face of spending money to save poor black people led to the death of close to 2,000 there. So if that is accepted to be the case, is it really inconceivable that they would engineer the deaths of a similar number to ensure lasting power and hegemony for the foreseeable future? Not at all. We are aware that the US will willingly sacrifice lives of millions of foreign civilians, and thousands of its own military, to ensure its own global power, so when viewed in this light, and in the stark light of events in New Orleans, it becomes hard to accept the idea that 9/11 is indeed a step that the US Government would not go beyond.
The financing of the attacks
The attacks, according to the co-chair of the 9/11 Commission Report, Tom Kean, cost $4-500,000 to carry out. A critical question therefore, though Kean inexplicably deemed it to be "of little practical significance", is where did this money come from. As has been reported in The Guardian, The Times of India, Asia Times, as well as the Wall Stree Journal, the Australian, and other media outlets from France to India, Indian Intelligence were informed by the FBI that $100,000 of this came from Mahmoud Ahmed, who was the head of the ISI- the Pakistani Intelligence Service- via renowned terrorist Saeed Sheikh. In any normal circumstances, Ahmed would surely be living in hiding having been labelled as a sponsor of state terrorism. But this is not the case. Ahmed, the man who is widely reported to have financed 20-25% of the worst ever terrorist attack on the US, spent the week of those attacks in Washington, meeting with senior government and intelligence officials of the country whose people he was helping to attack. This included breakfasting on the morning of 9/11 with Porter Goss and Bob Graham, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as meetings with George Tenet, the Director of the CIAon the 9th September.
Given the historical links between the CIA and the ISI, going back to US rapprochement with China under Nixon-Kissinger, and then the adding to the equation of the Taliban during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, it is unsurprising that revelations should surface linking the CIA and the ISI to attacks that are purported to have come out of Afghanistan. What is manna from heaven from anyone suspecting government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, is that such a link should have been made so explicit, with such wide reports regarding the financing, and then such an obvious connection manifested between the financer and US intelligence. Once more, if we apply these inputs to the framework of reasoning that is outlined above, the case for 9/11 Truth becomes increasingly hard to reject.
Some of the other issues
As stated at the top, the strucural strength of the movement comes from the fact that there are so many areas of improbability in the government report, and only one of them has to turn out to be false and indicative of government complicity for the TM argument to carry. Due to this nature of the argument, I will not be able to list all of the issues in this piece, but an excellent list of 50 key points is provided here by Jon Gold.
Conclusion
If we return to our original proposition, which is that there is sufficient evidence of government complicity in the attack, I think it is hard to conceive that even given the limited number of instances I have been able to look at into depth here (given time and space considerations), that this is not the case. This is not at all to say that there is not a conceivable scenario under which the government’s story could hold. As I have been at pains to underscore, the validity of the TM’s case is not contingent on it offering judge, jury and executioner proof of the guilt of the US Government in the attacks. This is the job of an official investigative body, whose pursuits will be catalysed by the evidence that the TM is, and has been able to bring to light. The job of the TM, and one that has been rendered very easy, given the evident facts of the day, is simply to illustrate the instances that point to likely criminal conduct on the part of the US Government. This serves as the basis for an investigation to be conducted.
Engaging in belief and understanding
The reaction of many people I meet to whom I explain some of these basic facts, is one of what I would call disengaged belief. That’s to say that they understand the facts, they are convinced by them, but the engagement in the belief is not there. This fact also explains the discrepancy between poll numbers- which show that around 40% of Americans are convinced by the TM’s overall case- and the fact that such numbers are not out on the street in open revolt against what they have understood to be their criminal government. To actually engage in the belief means to fully comprehend its implications. It means to fully comprehend the nature of government, industry and other power centres, and the lengths to which these entities will go to to preserve their own power. It would mean the drastic reevaluation of the images that we see on television and the internet of the leaders that we elect, and an utterly unpalatable realisation of our own implication and responsibility in the crimes our government commits. Such a radical reevaluation of world affairs is difficult for almost all people to swallow. As J Edgar Hoover said, “The individual is handicapped confronted with a conspiracy so monstrous, he cannot believe it exists”. This was precisely the phenomenon he was referring to. What handicaps the individual is the dichotomy between his current world view where leaders and power centres are essentially benign, if occasionally misbehaving individuals, and a reality where such “monstrous” conspiracies, implemented to further the true interests of power centres, are possible, logical, and do happen. They are indeed all the more likely to happen given the handicap of general members of the public, and their inability to engage in their belief in a monstrous conspiracy. It is just simple fact that if 40% of the US, 120 million people, engaged in their belief that the government needs to be investigated for possible criminal connections to 9/11, life in that country would become unrecognisable- precisely what it must become if justice is to be served. It is essential that when reading this article, the belief that gets engendered must be engaged upon- it is no use just believing it and setting it aside, and becoming another one of the 120 million who believes, but does not act. If you do this, you become part of Hoover’s handicapped public, that allows for future conspiracies to unfurl. This in turn allows for future murders, wars, and repressions. The issue of government connivance in the murder of 3,000 of its own citizens to launch a fraudulent war, the War on Terror, is not one that needs to be explained. Engage in the belief, actively demand a new investigation, and that way, not only will you be on the side of justice for the over 1 million who have died as a result of that day, but you will be involved in the effort to make such an catastrophic event less likely in the future.
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