Robert Fisk on 911 irregularities

[David Guyatt]

I got this from Peter's link to Pilots for 9/11 Truth on the Joel thread in this folder.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11

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Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience just one whom I call the "raver". Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a "raver".

His or her question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don't you tell the truth that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the phrase) who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the "raver" is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument a clincher, in my view is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything militarily, politically diplomatically it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim as the Americans did two days ago that al-Qa'ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer" in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering very definitely not in the "raver" bracket are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers which could well have been the beams cracking are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were and still are very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades released by the CIA mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder let alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now we create our own reality". True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

[Anthony Thorne]

"Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots."

I've always considered Fisk to be an asshole for writing those words. God forbid he lower himself down to the level of those awful conspiracy theorists like Bob McIlvaine (who lost his son to a WTC explosion) or the Jersey Girls (bereaved widows who suffered derision from right-wing pundits for asking pertinent questions) or Steven Jones, Sibel Edmonds, Peter Dale Scott, David Ray Griffin, Ray McGovern, Nafeez Ahmed, Colonel Robert Bowman and on and on, all of whom likely have studious and considered opinions about a possible 'plot' and could perhaps be forgiven for becoming emotional, or even raving, on the subject. Fisk needn't worry about being called a conspiracy theorist. He should worry about being called a prick, since his words demean those who have spent years giving away their spirit, energy and livelihoods in search of the truth. Shying away from being a 'conspiracy theorist' is a miserable tactic when facing an actual conspiracy.

[David Guyatt]

I agree Anthony. It seems to me that it has become a necessary statement by "serious" journalists, historians, academics and others who believe they form part of the intelligentsia, to place this caveat ahead of anything they wish to say that might be seen by their fellow travellers as even slightly suspect.

Such is the power of focused psyops and social engineering.

If they really were the intelligentsia, they would have the nouse - and the balls - to speak directly and forthrightly without needing to apologise in advance for having an opinion at variance with the norm. Doing so shows them to be weak and scared.

[Magda Hassan]

And always shown up eventually for what it is as seen here in Jan's thread:
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...#post69114

[Jan Klimkowski]

"Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots."

I've always considered Fisk to be an asshole for writing those words. God forbid he lower himself down to the level of those awful conspiracy theorists like Bob McIlvaine (who lost his son to a WTC explosion) or the Jersey Girls (bereaved widows who suffered derision from right-wing pundits for asking pertinent questions) or Steven Jones, Sibel Edmonds, Peter Dale Scott, David Ray Griffin, Ray McGovern, Nafeez Ahmed, Colonel Robert Bowman and on and on, all of whom likely have studious and considered opinions about a possible 'plot' and could perhaps be forgiven for becoming emotional, or even raving, on the subject. Fisk needn't worry about being called a conspiracy theorist. He should worry about being called a prick, since his words demean those who have spent years giving away their spirit, energy and livelihoods in search of the truth. Shying away from being a 'conspiracy theorist' is a miserable tactic when facing an actual conspiracy.

Anthony - I respectfully disagree.

Like Fisk, I am not a "conspiracy theorist".

It is a psyop term, designed to delegitimise and marginalise investigative research.

I will never allow the enemy to define me.

A fuller explanation of my reasoning can be seen in the "Conspiracy Theory" thread.

[Malcolm Pryce]

I agree with Anthony, I also thought Fisk was an asshole for writing this. He basically disparages and smears all those researchers who diligently and at great personal cost picked apart the official narrative, and then he does a sleight of hand and repeats most of their claims. The missing aircraft parts, the speed of collapse, Building 7, Flight 93, the hijackers' notes…what is left? To quote all that and then still denigrate as ravers the people who first drew attention to it is the act of a moral coward. A man who doesn't have the guts to call it for what it is, but sitll wants to cover his ass by saying, Oh yes, I thought the story didn't add up…

[Carsten Wiethoff]

I think both sides are right. "Conspiracy Theorist" is a term designed to denigrate people who happen to be convinced that the official story of something is bullshit. Insofar it would be legitimate by Fisk, insisting on not to be called by this term. But I don't think that was his intention.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Interesting piece by a what appears to me to be a good journalist. He does admit to having the need to have questions answered which he feels had not been at the time (at least). It should be pointed out that the collapse time or the effects of heat on structural steel are naive and show he is not armed with the facts to ask the right questions. And there are many questions to ask. Structural steel does not need to reach melting temp to fail. And once the structure has begun to redistribute loads, it enters a phase of rapidly increasing rate of a runaway progressive collapse with the overloads seen by the remaining parts of the structure seeing extreme rapid increase in stresses (loads). The resulted in the frame breaking apart like a collection of pick up sticks or falling like a house of cards.

And the collapse period is actually quite indeterminate though it was very brief (and not unexpectedly so) since it was close to 500,000 tons of material collapsing. It's not about to float to earth like a feather.

What Fiske and so many don't know is that these towers were innovative and never before seen designs. These towers were not your run of the mill sky scrapers... which likely would have fared differently. That discussion and the awareness and implication of the designs themselves has simply been completely ignored and is very crucial to understanding their total collapse.

Fiske and others know that official spin, conceal, deceive and lie for all manner of reasons even when they are not covering up their own crimes of commission. We see this sort of prevarication daily and have come to realize that the media is completely incapable of holding officials feet to the fire. But rather the reverse they simply report what they are told without question and give it an imprimatur by so doing. And now with the internet what Fiske refers to as ravens pop up fueled by internet activists and sleuths. These ravens are now a permanent fixture at public speaking events demanding answers and accountability. And many of them are nothing more than loose canons. Perhaps most. But not all.