WHAT THE 9/11 COMMISSION SHOULD BE INVESTIGATING, BUT
ISNT
The controversial testimony
of former counter-terrorism expert Richard
Clarke in juxtaposition with the constant drama surrounding whether or not
President Bush and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice will testify before the commission (under oath and
in public) is all just a scripted diversion to use up the Commission’s limited
time and ensure that the real issues are never investigated or aired publicly.
First, Clarke’s testimony is only partially genuine. He is playing a partisan role to help the
Democrats undermine Bush by confirming that Bush and other Cabinet members had
intentions to attack Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11 (which is true), but he
continues to foster the false idea that he and others during the Clinton
administration were highly focused on al Qaeda—a threat the Bush
administration, he says, failed to take seriously. In reality, the Clinton administration during Clarke’s tenure never
tried to capture Osama bin Laden any more than the Bush administration,
even when the Sudanese government had him in their custody and offered to turn
him over to the US. Clarke had to have
known this.
CBS News and a Frontline
Special reported that within hours of the 9/11 attack, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was instructing his aides to come up with plans for striking
Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was
planned before 9/11, as evidenced by US diplomatic pronouncements to a closed
meeting in Berlin in July 2001 where it was leaked that Bush would attack Afghanistan
no later than October 2001. The
Indymedia documentation of that meeting has since been purged from all
government internet sites. The India
Times also reported a secret military agreement between the US and Russia in
the spring of 2001 to jointly invade Afghanistan. Many suspect that the main reason VP Cheney is so adamant about
refusing to disclose minutes of what went on during the secret meetings on
energy is because oil giants openly discussed with Cheney the need to overthrow
the Taliban in order to be able to build a major pipeline through Afghanistan.
Currently, the Bush
administration has said they will allow
Condoleezza Rice to testify in public and under oath. Despite the months of wrangling over
executive privilege and separation of powers, it’s a safe bet that Rice won’t be
embarrassed by the pseudo-inquisitor, Chief Counsel Richard Ben Veniste. I listened to Ben Veniste’s examination of
numerous government officials on NPR radio.
By all the initial joking and comradery that was exchanged between him
and CIA Director Tenet, and later with Asst. Sec. of State Richard Armitage
(former chief drug importer for the CIA), it was clear no tough questions were
going to be forthcoming. He played
softball with them both. Instead of
setting up legal traps in advance by asking questions Ben Veniste could later
trip them up on, he wasted hours asking them questions these officials could
easily evade by claiming ignorance or “national security,” and then failed to
present any contradictory testimony.
It will be the same with
Rice. There are dozens of general
explanations she can come up with to explain the contradictions between her
former statements to the press and the testimony of Richard Clarke. But even if Ben Veniste were able to make something
of the differences, what would they show?
That the CIA was negligent, incompetent, and worked at cross purposes
with other agencies? Or, heaven forbid,
that they failed to share information with other agencies? If they are guilty, so what? These are not faults meriting more than a slap
on the hands. No wonder no government
official responsible for security and intelligence has been fired. By focusing
on such innocuous drama, the public is denied the key issues that cry out for
an explanation.
HERE ARE THE KEY ISSUES THAT ARE BEING EVADED:
Planted, too-good-to-be-true evidence:
Hijackers are apparently too
stupid to follow one of the cardinal rules of covering your trail: Don’t drive
to the airport – have an accomplice or Arab taxi driver drop you off. Instead, they drove themselves to Boston
Logan Airport, and proceeded to leave flight manuals and Arabic messages in
their van. Mohammed Atta’s magic
indestructible passport survived the inferno of Twin Towers and was found two
or three blocks away. (Two passports
were foundin all, plus a pristine suicide letter in Arabic.) Within two hours, FBI agents were at
restaurants where the hijackers had been eating, and at nightclubs where they
went carousing — so much for their religiosity. How did they find this information so fast if they were too
incompetent to track them beforehand?
Refusal of the government to produce tape and video
evidence that would corroborate the official version of events and the list of
hijackers:
The surveillance video
recorded at the gas station across from the Pentagon crash site was confiscated
by the FBI and never released. The
parking lot video excerpt that was leaked doesn’t show thing but a tiny jet and
a smoke trail. Crash proof black boxes from all aircraft except one were
claimed to be destroyed or unreadable.
The Commission claimed it would subpoena FAA recordings of conversations with pilots prior to the hijacking, but never has followed through or released them. One tape recording from Cleveland Air Traffic Control that monitored the fate of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania was leaked, so we know these tapes exists. Interestingly, this tape shows that three or four other commercial aircraft talking on the same ATC frequency heard the pilot of Flight 93 tell the passengers that the hijackers told them there was a bomb on board, and yet the government has never mentioned this.
Here’s an abbreviated excerpt
from the leaked private ATC transcript:
Executive 956 [private jet]: Just answering your call. We could year that, er,
yelling too.
Cleveland Center: OK, thank you, were just trying to figure out what’s going on.
United 93:
[unintelligible] this is captain, please sit down, remain sitting, we have a
bomb on board. [Sometimes pilots key the
wrong button. In this case the Captain
thinks he is broadcasting to the passengers on intercom but he is pressing the
radio transmit button—shows he is under severe stress.]
Cleveland Center: Uh, calling Cleveland Center, you’re unreadable, say again slowly.
Executive 956:
[unintelligible] was reasonable, sounded like someone said they had a bomb on
board.
Cleveland:
That’s what we thought, we just, er, we didn’t get it clear. …United
ninety-three calling. United ninety-three, understand you have a bomb on board,
go ahead. Executive nine fifty-six, did you understand that transmission?
Executive 956:
Affirmative. He said there was a bomb on board.
[Later]Cleveland Center (2): [Voice changed to female, apparently second
Cleveland controller.] Do you see any, ah, activity on your right side,
smoke or anything like that?
American 1060:
Negative. Were searching. Yeah, we do have a smoke puff now at about, er, oh
probably two o’clock. There appears to be just a spire up like a puff of black
smoke. [Indicates evidence of
explosion in the air.]
[End of ATC excerpt.]
Lack of verifiable evidence of hijackers’ identities:
Security cameras at airport
boarding gates would have clearly shown the Arab hijackers. The government won’t release them or the
actual passenger manifests, including Arabic named passengers. The claimed DNA samples are a fraud unless
the government can prove it has custody of original DNA from the hijackers,
seven of whom (according to other evidence) are still alive and nine of whom
were dead or missing before 9/11.
Lack of evidence that al Qaeda is a world wide
terrorist organization:
Al Qaeda had roots with the
CIA, so it may still be controlled at the higher levels, for purposes of
creating conflict and engendering in Americans a blind patriotism to support a
phony war on terror. The CIA and its
cohorts in the Pakistani ISI and the Israeli Mossad are the only sources of
information on al Qaeda, which is suspicious.
The organization was rarely considered a credible threat before 9/11. Even now, the CIA consistently refuses to
display captured al Qaeda leaders in public or put them on trial. All leaks about supposed confessions mirror
the government’s story and have no other corroborating evidence. Of greatest significance is the fact that
there have been virtually no normal terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11,
even though the US has almost open borders and no protection against car
bombings, electrical tower sabotage, or suicide bombings: weekly occurrences
wherever terrorism is a legitimate threat.
Evidence of CIA involvement with the terrorists:
Ruddy Dekker, the owner of
Huffman Aviation, and a fellow Dutchman who bought another aviation school next
door, both had prior CIA dealings.
Dekker had no previous aviation experience prior to acquiring Huffman Aviation
in Venice, Florida, and showed a broad ignorance of technical aviation
regulations and affairs when dealing with other professionals in the
field. He sublet space in his hangar to
Britannia Aviation, another government front company.
Prior knowledge warnings:
High schools in some NY city
districts told students not to go down to the WTC on 9/11. SF Mayor Brown was told not to fly that day,
as was Salmon Rusdy in the UK. Putin
warned Bush about 25 suicide pilots.
Germany and the Israeli Mossad said the US was warned not to fly that
day.
Evidence of explosives in the World Trade Centers:
Investigative journalist
Christopher Bollyn has written one of the best expositions on the ample
evidence that there were explosives wired into the building prior to the attack. He writes, “In the basements of the
collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the
bedrock, hot spots of ‘literally molten steel’ were discovered more than a
month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet
below the surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these
crucial structural supports failed. Peter Tully, president of Tully
Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw pools of ‘literally molten
steel’ at the World Trade Center.
“Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to
remove the debris from the site. Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of
Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about
removing the debris. CDI calls itself ‘the innovator and global leader in the
controlled demolition and implosion of structures.’ Loizeaux, who cleaned up
the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the
WTC site two days later and wrote the clean up plan for the entire operation.
AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site. ‘Yes,’ he
said, ‘hot spots of molten steel in the basements.’ These incredibly hot areas
were found ‘at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down
seven [basement] levels,’ Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found ‘three,
four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,’ Loizeaux said.
He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in
the late afternoon.
“Construction steel has an extremely high melting point
of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Asked what could have caused such extreme
heat, Tully said, ‘Think of the jet fuel.’ Loizeaux told AFP that the
steel-melting fires were fueled by ‘paper, carpet and other combustibles packed
down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they pancaked into the
basement.’ However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying
kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the
towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an
oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
“Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC
collapse, Painful Questions, told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen,
paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would
probably be ‘a smoky smoldering pile.’ Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper
could generate such heat. This is impossible, they say, because the maximum
temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet fuel burning in air is
1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the
thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit. The
hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available,
were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.” [End of
Bollyn quote.]
Canadian Investigator Will Thomas has written an excellent work entitled, All Fall Down. In it he documents, “An eyewitness 6 blocks from the WTC heard
explosions prior to each collapse. A fireman’s transcription of the New York
Times 9/11 firefighters’ audio tape reveals an explosion prior to the collapse
of WTC 2 was reported. A video shows an object falling from WTC 1 followed by a
camera shake. 14 seconds later WTC 1 collapses.”
Thomas, Bollyn and others
believe that the only explanation that explains the collapse of the Twin Towers
without the use of complicated timed explosives placed throughout the building
(requiring extensive pre-wiring) is the use of thermite charges in the
basement, filling the cavity of the core section of 4 inch thick pillars
holding up the towers. Here’s Bollyn
again: “Thermite is very exothermic. Temperatures above 4,500°F (2,500°C) are
often reached. A byproduct of a thermite detonation in the WTC basements would
be molten steel. The service core [of
central pillars] of WTC 2 initially survived the collapse, but after a few
seconds it also came to ground. This is consistent with molten iron from a
thermite reaction pooling around the core columns, thus causing the
collapse. ‘If I were to bring the
towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the
building to help collapse the structure,’ [says] Mark Loizeaux, president of
Controlled Demolition, Inc.”
However, contrary to Bollyn,
I disagree that the seismic evidence shows powerful explosives prior to the
collapse. I have looked at the charts
and fail to see what he claims. Yes,
there were plenty of eye and ear witnesses to prior explosions, but they most
likely were not large enough to register on the seismic charts as a significant
quake. This also points to the use of
thermite. Thermite doesn’t explode
rapidly like C-4 or other demolition explosives. The mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide burns only
moderately fast, giving off heat well in excess of that required to melt
steel. What’s more, it creates its own
oxygen supply by consuming the iron oxide and thus is the only thing that can
account for the huge heat being generated for days in the aftermath of the fall
of both towers.
Terrorists of the Arab
variety could not have pulled off this operation, nor the earlier downing of
WTC Building 7, which video evidence does show had been prewired with normal
demolition explosives — lots of small charges on all critical steel columns
which were timed to collapse the building vertically. Building 7 was almost exclusively occupied by government, and
could have been pre-wired by government agents without alerting civilians.
Christopher Bollyn commented
on the insider connections to the WTC complex: “For example, Peter G. Peterson,
chairman of the CFR and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that his
Blackstone Group had purchased, in October 2000, the mortgage on 7 World Trade
Center, the 47-story building built by Larry Silverstein in 1987. Silverstein
is the person who obtained 99-year leases on the twin towers shortly before
9-11 and who insured the property and its future income against terrorism. He
is seeking some $7.2 billion claiming the attacks were two separate
events.” Silverstein also made the indiscreet comment to reporters that he had
given orders to “pull the building” just prior to its collapse. This is demolition lingo for bringing down a
building by controlled demolition.
According to Bollyn, others suspected controlled demolition too: “WTC 7 mysteriously collapsed at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11, in what appears to have been a controlled demolition. John Wholihan, a firefighter with Rescue 5 from Staten Island was near WTC 7 when it collapsed. Wholihan told American Free Press that he heard ‘many explosions’ just before the building collapsed neatly within the perimeter of its foundation. Silverstein received some $441 million in insurance money for WTC 7 although the cause of the collapse remains officially unexplained.”
What is clear, in my
analysis, is that the official explanation of it coming down vertically and
instantly cannot meet the test of reality.
If it suffered damage from the collapse of the nearby WTC tower, it would
have only been damaged on one side. A
collapse from damage to one side would only have occurred with a massive
falling over movement. There was no
central system of support to fail in this building that could explain a
vertical collapse even with fire (which was not uniform throughout the
building).
Selective stand-down of military interceptors:
One of the most powerful
evidences of government participation in the outcome of this attack by what I
think were government controlled operatives, is the shooting down of Flight 93
over Pennsylvania by an F-16 aircraft, and the simultaneous but inexplicable
holding of other fighters on the ground (orders to “stand down”). One of my subscribers is friends with a tower
operator at McGuire AFB in NJ. He reports
that his friend told him to not permit any fighters to take off. They could have easily stopped Flight 175
heading for the second WTC strike.
(Flight 175 was the Boeing 757 airliner that several video tapes showed
had a large bulging modification on its belly, as documented in a prior World
Affairs Brief.) Other fighters which
were launched did so painfully late and were not told to “go buster”
(supersonic speeds), to make sure they wouldn’t catch the Pentagon targeting
aircraft on time. All of this analysis
is contained in Will Thomas’ publication, entitled Stand Down.
The strange case of the Pentagon attack:
The attack on the Pentagon
was much more complex than the government’s version of events, and also filled
with contradictory evidence: lack of external debris coupled with a damage area
too small to match a 757 airliner. The
Pentagon parking lot video shows a huge, white explosion on the Pentagon wall,
followed by a fuel-fed fire. Ordinary
people wouldn’t know that only high explosives can generate this white
image—and that it never occurs with the crash of a fuel-laden aircraft. The strangely edited video clip evens fails
to show a large airliner crashing into the Pentagon, but rather the hazy image of
a much smaller fighter-sized jet with a mysterious smoke or missile trail. Witnesses did see a large airliner, but
others also saw a smaller jet. It is
possible both were present, and that the smaller jet fired a missile into the
Pentagon wall prior to the crash, which would explain how one object punched a
12-foot-diameter hole through three rings of the Pentagon. This could not have been done by any part of
the relatively soft airliner nor its turbo fan engines. The video clip showing the smoke trail looks
strangely unlike a real smoke trail from a missile (too white and too much soft
curling smoke). It is almost as if
whoever leaked the edited clip doctored it to give a hint that there was
another aircraft and a missile involved.
Conclusions: As you can see from my abbreviated listing, there is
no shortage of legitimate and substantive matters to investigate. No government commission with the kind of
money and staff this commission has could possibly be unaware of these issues I
have mentioned. They are documented and
discussed by tens of credible internet sites, complete with photos, videos,
theories, and laborious investigations.
WhatReallyHappened.com is one of the most comprehensive, though I don’t
buy into the total package of conclusions proffered by any one site. One must look at a variety of theories and
issues to come to a final conclusion.
All these private investigations need some
form of legal power of discovery in order to penetrate various veils of
government secrecy surrounding key issues.
The 9/11 Commission has failed the public by refusing to provide that
penetration into government secrets.
All of the roadblocks met by investigators have been put up by our own
government—almost as if they really don’t want the public to find out exactly
how these sophisticated attacks took place.
I, for one, am convinced that Muslim
terrorists were involved, but that they were directed and assisted by a huge
network of secret operatives that only the US government could have produced. No portion of the 9/11 Commission investigation
was allowed to follow through with any evidence pointing to government
collusion in this great tragedy. That
is why this investigation is an exercise in futility, if not a direct
cover-up.