Author
|
Topic: Debunking 9/11 (Read 2613 times) |
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4289
Reputation: 8.78
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
 
|
 |
Debunking 9/11
« on: 2009-09-11 17:11:29 » |
 |
How 9/11 Should Be Remembered
Source: TomsDispatch.com
Authors: Tom Engelhardt
Dated: 2009-09-11
On September 11, 2001, a fellow New Yorker and friend of mine, a public health historian who knew instantly what the dangers were, bicycled directly into the smoke, ash, and chemicals that hung over lower Manhattan searching for his daughter whose school was only blocks away from the collapsed buildings. She was, it turned out, "safe" in that same pall of dangerous smoke. She had been evacuated to the street with her class in time to see people leaping or falling to their deaths from the upper floors of one of the crippled towers. You probably couldn’t live in New York City that day and not be connected, however indirectly, to someone who died. In my case, it was the father of a classmate of my son’s, a photographer, who also advanced into the chaos near one of the towers, leaving behind an eerie, moving trail of photographs.
As for myself, I was on my bedroom floor that morning most undramatically exercising when my wife called to tell me that something was happening. By then, TV cameras were already focused on the first punctured tower and, remembering tales of the B-25 that had hit the Empire State Building in 1945, I assumed I was watching a horrifying accident. Another friend, a rare North American who remembered the first 9/11 — that day in 1973 when Salvador Allende, the Chilean president, was overthrown and murdered in a U.S.-backed military coup — thought it might be Chilean payback.
Any half-plausible idea was, for a while, possible. History hadn’t set. The Bush administration, in disarray, hadn’t yet hijacked the day or the country. September 11th, still being lived, hadn’t been renamed "Patriot Day." There was, as yet, no Department of Homeland Security, no Patriot Act. No one had been rounded up. No wars had been launched.
As for New Yorkers, those of us not making our way out of — or into — the danger zone were on the phone checking on loved ones, listening to rumors, or outside in the streets, talking to each other, wondering while the sirens wailed. It was a memorably terrible moment, but not, in fact, a nightmare of fear; nor would New York ever, as far as I could tell, find itself in the grip of blind revenge as, it seemed, so much of the country would soon be. Not so long after 9/11, for instance, two New Yorkers I know — one had been close indeed to the collapsing towers — headed for Afghanistan, not armed to kill but to help.
I remember my own now-embarrassing first reaction to 9/11 (once I grasped what was actually happening). It was unexpectedly dense and unprophetic, given the American reaction to come. I thought, then, that perhaps the horror of those acts of destruction and mass murder in my own city would open Americans to the sort of pain so many others in the world had felt — sometimes, in fact, at our own hands. It might, I thought, change our politics. It did, of course, do that, but in no way I imagined. And that was the strange, unexplained thing for me: it seemed as if living at "ground zero" during the assaults of 9/11 somehow made you the worst predictor of what our nation would feel and do.
For me, even today, an especially unnerving aspect of 9/11 was the way so many Americans donned "I [heart] New York" T-shirts and hats — New York having, until then, been Sodom to Los Angeles’s Gomorrah for much of the country — and under the Bush administration’s fear-filled ministrations, began beating the drums of war, while panicking over prospective terrorists launching improbable attacks on their local amusement parks and landmarks. It seemed craven to me then and still does today.
Eight disastrous years later, I suddenly understand that day so much better, thanks to Rebecca Solnit, whom 9/11 indirectly sent my way offering hope in dark times. Now, she’s returned with her latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which capsizes our most basic sense of what disaster is all about, humanly speaking. As befits an author who has written a guidebook to getting lost, she is bold beyond belief and her originality matches that boldness. And here’s the thing: if you take a journey into disaster with her (9/11 being but one of the many disasters she explores in the book), you won’t get lost. You’ll find yourself. You’ll find ourselves, our better selves, even in catastrophe.
Think of Paradise as the perfect companion volume to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Klein explained how governments try to take advantage of disasters to optimize their power and wealth (and that of their cronies); Solnit explains what ordinary people in disasters regularly do for themselves. They don’t, as we have been taught, run screaming from danger. They head for the smoke, pedaling hard, and then, without the help of governments, they begin to organize. They become, briefly, their better selves. So here’s a thought: Maybe it was the lack of the actual experience of 9/11 that left the rest of America so vulnerable when the Bush administration led them toward their lesser selves.
How 9/11 Should Be Remembered
The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People
Source: TomsDispatch.com
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
Dated: 2009-09-11
Twenty years ago this October, Rebecca Solnit was writing about the Kennedy assassination for her first book when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. She hit save, stood in a doorway until the shaking was over, and marveled in the days after at the calm, warm mood of the people of her city and her own changed state of mind. She’s written regularly for TomDispatch since the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Her just published new book, A Paradise Built in Hell (Penguin, 2009), is a monument to human bravery and innovation during disasters.
Eight years ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word "terrorism," which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost (even if some of us don’t know that yet), and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.
Only We Can Terrorize Ourselves
For this eighth anniversary of that terrible day, the first post-Bush-era anniversary, let’s remember what actually happened:
When the planes became missiles and the towers became torches and then shards and clouds of dust, many were afraid, but few if any panicked, other than the President who was far away from danger. The military failed to respond promptly, even though the Pentagon itself was attacked, and the only direct resistance that day came from inside Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington.
Flights 11 and 175 struck the towers. Hundreds of thousands of people rescued each other and themselves, evacuating the buildings and the area, helped in the first minutes, then hours, by those around them. Both PS 150, an elementary school, and the High School for Leadership and Public Service were successfully evacuated — without casualties. In many cases, teachers took students home with them.
A spontaneously assembled flotilla of boats, ranging from a yacht appropriated by policemen to a historic fireboat, evacuated 300,000 to 500,000 people from lower Manhattan, a nautical feat on the scale of the British evacuation of its army from Dunkirk in the early days of World War II; the fleet, that is, rescued in a few hours as many people as the British fleet rescued in days (under German fire admittedly, but then New York’s ferry operators and pleasure-boat captains were steering into that toxic cloud on a day when many thought more violence was to come).
Adam Mayblum, who walked down from the 87th floor of the north tower with some of his coworkers, wrote on the Internet immediately afterward:"They failed in terrorizing us. We were calm. If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States." We failed, however, when we let our own government and media do what that small band from the other side of the Earth could not. Some of us failed, that is, for there were many kinds of response, and some became more radical, more committed, more educated. Mark Fichtel, the president of the New York Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange, who scraped his knees badly that morning of September 11th when he was knocked over in a fleeing crowd, was helped to his feet by "a little old lady." He nonetheless had his Exchange up and running the next day, and six months later quit his job, began studying Islam, and then teaching about it.
Tom Engelhardt, the editor of this piece, began to circulate emails to counter the crummy post-9/11 media coverage and his no-name informal listserv grew into the website Tomdispatch.com, which has circulated more than 1,000 essays since that day and made it possible for me to become a different kind of writer. Principal Ada Rosario-Dolch, who on the morning of September 11th set aside concern for her sister Wendy Alice Rosario Wakeford (who died in the towers) to evacuate her high school two blocks away, went to Afghanistan in 2004 to dedicate a school in Herat, Afghanistan, that included a garden memorializing Wakeford.
In a Dust Storm of Altruism
Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our ability to prepare for disasters.
Hollywood likes this view because it paves the way for movies starring Will Smith and hordes of stampeding, screaming extras. Without stupid, helpless people to save, heroes become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones like that elderly woman who got Fichtel back on his feet. Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries.
Far more people could have died on September 11th if New Yorkers had not remained calm, had not helped each other out of the endangered buildings and the devastated area, had not reached out to pull people from the collapsing buildings and the dust cloud. The population of the towers was lower than usual that morning, because it was an election day and many were voting before heading to work; it seems emblematic that so many were spared because they were exercising their democratic powers. Others exercised their empathy and altruism. In the evacuation of the towers, John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant, was carried down 69 flights of stairs by his coworkers.
Here’s how John Guilfoy, a young man who’d been a college athlete, recalled the 9/11 moment:"I remember looking back as I started running, and the thickest smoke was right where it was, you know, a few blocks away, and thinking that, like, whoever’s going to be in that is just going to die. There’s no way you could — you’re going to suffocate, and it was coming at us. I remember just running, people screaming. I was somewhat calm, and I was little bit faster than my colleagues, so I had to stop and slow up a little bit and wait for them to make sure we didn’t lose each other." Had he been in a disaster movie, he would have been struggling in some selfish, social-darwinist way to survive at others’ expense, or he would simply have panicked, as we are all supposed to do in disaster. In the reality of September 11th, in a moment of supreme danger, he slowed down out of solidarity.
Many New Yorkers that day committed similar feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery — one of their many counter-stereotypical conclusions — that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.
A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped, looked at his pendant’s Arabic inscription and then, "with a deep Brooklyn accent he said ‘Brother if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren’t for him I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris." A blind newspaper vendor was walked to safety by two women, and a third escorted her to her home in the Bronx.
Errol Anderson, a recruiter with the fire department, was caught outside in that dust storm."For a couple of minutes I heard nothing. I thought I was either dead and was in another world, or I was the only one alive. I became nervous and panicky, not knowing what to do, because I couldn’t see… About four or five minutes later, while I was still trying to find my way around, I heard the voice of a young lady. She was crying and saying, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.’ I was so happy to hear this lady’s voice. I said, ‘Keep talking, keep talking, I’m a firefighter, I’ll find you by the response of where you are.’ Eventually we met up with each other and basically we ran into each other’s arms without even knowing it."
She held onto his belt and eventually several other people joined them to form a human chain. He helped get them to the Brooklyn Bridge before returning to the site of the collapsed buildings. That bridge became a pedestrian escape route for tens of thousands. For hours, a river of people poured across it. On the far side, Hasidic Jews handed out bottles of water to the refugees. Hordes of volunteers from the region, and within days the nation, converged on lower Manhattan, offering to weld, dig, nurse, cook, clean, hear confessions, listen — and did all of those things.
New Yorkers triumphed on that day eight years ago. They triumphed in calm, in strength, in generosity, in improvisation, in kindness. Nor was this something specific to that time or place: San Franciscans during the great earthquake of 1906, Londoners during the Blitz in World War II, the great majority of New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina hit, in fact most people in most disasters in most places have behaved with just this sort of grace and dignity.
It Could Have Been Different
Imagine what else could have sprung from that morning eight years ago. Imagine if the collapse of those towers had not been followed by such a blast of stereotypes, lies, distortions, and fear propaganda that served the agenda of the Bush administration while harming the rest of us — Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, and so many others, for people from 90 nations died in the attacks that day and probably those from many more nations survived at what came to be called Ground Zero.
Not long ago I talked to Roberto Sifuentes, a Chicano performance artist who was then living in New York. Like many New Yorkers, he still marvels at that brief, almost utopian moment of opening in the midst of tragedy, when everyone wanted to talk about meaning, about foreign policy, about history, and did so in public with strangers. It was a moment of passionate engagement with the biggest questions and with one another. On a few occasions, Sifuentes was threatened and nearly attacked for having approximately the same skin tone as an Arab, but he was also moved by the tremendous opening of that moment, the great public dialogue that had begun, and he took part in it with joy.
In five years of investigation and in my own encounter with the San Francisco Bay Area’s Loma Prieta earthquake 20 years ago, I’ve found that disasters are often moments of strange joy. My friend Kate Joyce, then a 19-year-old living in New Mexico, had landed in New York on the very morning of September 11, 2001, and spent the next several days in Union Square, the park-like plaza at 14th Street that became a regular gathering point.
She relished the astonishing forum that Union Square became in those days when we had a more perfect union: "We spoke passionately of the contemporary and historical conflicts, contradictions and connections affecting our lives," she wrote me later. "We stayed for hours, through the night, and into the week riveted and expressive, in mourning and humbled, and in the ecstasy of a transformative present." Such conversations took place everywhere.
We had that more perfect union, and then we let them steal it.
Perhaps Barack Obama, the candidate who delivered that address on race, pain, and nuance entitled "A More Perfect Union" some 18 months ago, could have catalyzed us to remain open-minded in the face of horror, to rethink our foreign policy, to try to grasp the real nature of the attack by that small band which was so obviously not an act of war, and to make of it an opportunity to change, profoundly. Such a response would have had to recognize that many were killed or widowed or orphaned on that September 11th , but none were defeated. Not that day. It would have had to recognize that such events are immeasurably terrible, but neither so rare as we Americans like to imagine, nor insurmountable. (Since 9/11, far more have been killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the 2008 Burma typhoon, and of course the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Congo, among other events. More in this country have, in fact, died of domestic violence since that day.)
Obama, the candidate, might have been capable of that; of President Obama I’m not so sure. He has, after all, expanded the war in Afghanistan that was the first monstrous outcome of that day in New York. But he’s had his moments, too, and it may be that another set of disasters — the social disasters of racism, poverty, and government failure laid bare during and after Hurricane Katrina — helped make it possible for him to become our president.
After the 9/11 storm struck, the affected civilians in New York were seen as victims; after Katrina, those in New Orleans were portrayed as brutes. In both cities, the great majority of affected people were actually neither helpless nor savage; they were something else — they were citizens, if by that word we mean civic engagement rather than citizenship status. In both places ordinary people were extraordinarily resourceful, generous, and kind, as were some police officers, firefighters, rescue workers, and a very few politicians. In both cases, the majority of politicians led us astray. All I would have wanted in that September moment, though, was politicians who stayed out of the way, and people who were more suspicious of the news and the newsmakers.
The media, too, stepped between us and the event, failing us with their stock of clichés about war and heroes, their ready adoption of the delusional notion of a "war on terror," their refusal to challenge the administration as it claimed that somehow the Saudi-spawned, fundamentalist al-Qaeda was linked to the secularist Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and that we should fear mythical Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction." Rarely did they mention that we had, in fact, been bombing Iraq without interruption since 1991.
After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in our gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been no soldiers returning to the U.S. with two or three limbs missing or their heads and minds grievously damaged (there were already 320,000 traumatic brain injuries to soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by early 2008, according to the RAND Corporation); there would not have been a next round of American deaths — 4,334 in Iraq, 786 in Afghanistan to date; there would have been no trillion dollars taken from constructive projects to fatten the corporations of war; no extreme corrosion of the Bill of Rights, no usurpation of powers by the executive branch. Perhaps.
We Are the Monument
It could all have been different. It’s too late now, but not too late, never too late, to change how we remember and commemorate this event and that other great landmark of the Bush era, Hurricane Katrina, and so prepare for disasters to come.
For the 99 years before that hurricane hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, the biggest urban disaster in American history was in my city, San Francisco. Half the city, including more than 28,000 buildings, was destroyed, and about 3,000 people probably died. The earthquake early on the morning of April 18, 1906, did a lot of damage, but the fires did more. Some were started by collapsed buildings and broken gas mains, others by the army troops who streamed in from the Presidio at the northern tip of the city and ineptly built firebreaks that instead actually spread the fires.
The presiding officer, Brigadier General Frederick Funston, presumed that the public would immediately revert to chaos and that his task was restoring order. In the first days after the disaster, the truth was more or less the other way around, as the Army and the National Guard prevented citizens from fighting the fires and collecting their property, shot people as looters (including rescuers and bystanders), and generally regarded the public as the enemy (as did some of the officials presiding over the post-Katrina "rescue"). As with many disasters, a calamity that came from outside was magnified by elite fears and institutional failures within. Still, on their own, San Franciscans organized themselves remarkably, fought fires when they could, created a plethora of community kitchens, helped reconnect separated families, and began to rebuild.
Every year we still celebrate the anniversary of the earthquake at Lotta’s Fountain, which, like Union Square after 9/11, became a meeting place for San Franciscans in the largely ruined downtown. That gathering brings hundreds of people together before dawn to sing the silly song "San Francisco," get free whistles from the Red Cross, and pay homage to the dwindling group of survivors. (Two, who’d been babies in 1906, arrived this year in the backseat of a magnificent 1931 Lincoln touring car.)
Some of us then go on to the fire hydrant at 20th and Church that saved the Mission District, the hydrant that miraculously had water when most of the water mains were broken and the men who had already been fighting the fire by hand for days were exhausted beyond belief. The oldest person at the gathering always begins an annual repainting of the hydrant with a can of gold spray paint, and then some kids get to wield the spray can.
San Francisco now uses the anniversary to put out the message that we should be prepared for the next disaster — not the version the Department of Homeland Security spread in the years after 9/11 with the notion that preparation consists of fear, duct tape, deference, and more fear, but practical stuff about supplies and strategies. My city even trains anyone who wants to become a certified NERT — for the nerdy-sounding Neighborhood Emergency Response Team — member, and about 17,000 of us are badge-carrying, hard-hat owning NERT members (including me).
Every city that has had, or will have, a disaster should have such a carnival of remembrance and preparation. For one thing, it commemorates all the ways that San Franciscans were not defeated and are not helpless; for another, it reminds us that, in disaster, we are often at our best, however briefly, that in those hours and days many have their best taste of community, purposefulness, and power. (Reason enough for many of those who are supposed to be in charge to shudder.) For the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians were invited to ring bells, lay wreaths, pray, encircle the Superdome, that miserable shelter of last resort for those stranded in the hurricane and flood, and of course listen to music and dance in the streets to second-line parades, but also to keep volunteering and rebuilding. (Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of that disaster is the vast army of citizen-volunteers who came to the city’s aid, when the government didn’t, and are still doing so.)
New York has its pillars of light and readings of names for the anniversary of 9/11, but it seems to lack any invitation to the citizenry to feel its own power and prepare for the next calamity. For there will be next times for San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, and possibly — in this era of extreme and turbulent weather, and economic upheaval — a great many other cities and towns in this country and elsewhere.
That hydrant on a quiet residential corner of San Francisco is about the only monument to the 1906 earthquake and fire. The rebuilt city, the eventual rise of disaster preparedness, the people who go on with their everyday lives — these are the monument San Francisco needed and every city needs to transcend its calamities. New Yorkers could gather in Union Square and elsewhere to remember what happened, really remember, remember that the heroes weren’t necessarily men, or in uniform, but were almost everyone everywhere that day.
They could open their hearts and minds to discuss mourning, joy, death, violence, power, weakness, truth and lies, as they did that week. They could consider what constitutes safety and security, what else this country could be, and what its foreign and energy policies have to do with these things. They could walk the streets together to demonstrate that New York is still a great city, whose people were not frightened into going into hiding or flight from public and urban life. They could more consciously and ceremoniously do what New Yorkers, perhaps best of all Americans, do every day: coexist boldly and openly in a great mixture of colors, nationalities, classes, and opinions, daring to speak to strangers and to live in public.
The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4289
Reputation: 8.78
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #1 on: 2009-09-11 19:38:31 » |
|
9/11: Our Truth, and Theirs
The "official" 9/11 narrative doesn't make sense
[ Hermit : Also worth plugging in some of Siebel Edmond's well supported allegations about the USA's government being the best that money can buy. ]
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Justin Raimondo
Dated: 2009-09-11
On September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers, wielding nothing more lethal than box-cutters, commandeered four airliners, and turned them into lethal missiles, three of which managed to hit their targets – the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – while a fourth crashed in a field before it could strike its intended target — the White House. One of the hijackers had been in the United States since the mid-1990s, and the others, according to subsequent investigations, entered, exited, and re-entered the United States regularly starting in 2000.
In the years and months prior to 9/11, the terrorists remained undetected: there was not a hint, and certainly no warning, that we were about to experience the worst terrorist attack in our history. In spite of all the billions spent on "anti-terrorism" programs during the Clinton years, and the combined efforts of our intelligence community and those of our allies’, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts managed to evade detection until the day they emblazoned their vengeance across the sky and pulled off the biggest terrorist attack in US history.
That, at least, is the official story. As to what the real story is – well, we’re not allowed to ask.
President Obama’s "green czar," one Van Jones, was recently pressured into resigning. His crime? He had once signed a letter originating with one of the "9/11 Truth" organizations calling for a new investigation of the terrorist attacks. No, he hadn’t declared that 9/11 was an "inside job," as some of the more flamboyant "truthers" assert: indeed, he hadn’t challenged any one specific aspect of the official story. All he had asked for was a new investigation – and once this got out (thanks to Fox News nut-job Glenn Beck), he was shown the door.
This is the way our society deals with uncomfortable questions about "official" explanations for the inexplicable – by purging all dissenters, and even anybody who asks a question without necessarily having a ready-made answer. To the stake with them! Burn the heretics! Move along, nothing to see here – and don’t ask questions unless you want to completely marginalize yourself, lose your job, and be subjected to an intensive hate campaign.
We are asked to believe that 19 men, armed with the most basic weapons, somehow managed to elude the biggest, most expensively-accoutered intelligence apparatus in the world — and the intelligence agencies of our allies, to boot. Utilizing nothing but box-cutters and the knowledge gleaned from a few weeks at flight school, these supermen somehow managed to steer those planes into two of the most visible potential terrorist targets in the US, one of which had been successfully targeted by terrorists before. They did this with no help from any foreign intelligence agency, no nation-state in on the plot, and they did it for less than $100,000.
Really?
The more distance in time from the actual event, the odder such an assertion seems. Eight years to the day, the official account of 9/11 seems more anemic –and inadequate – than ever. Yet anyone who questions the official story – the narrative of 19 Arab dudes going on what would seem to be a rather quixotic jihad, haphazardly making their way through a strange foreign country on their own, all the while readying themselves for The Day That Changed History – is denounced as a "conspiracy theorist," a crackpot, and worse.
Of course, some of the people who challenge the official story are, indeed, crackpots: they think some kind of "controlled demolition" took place inside the World Trade Center, and that no plane hit the Pentagon.
This is very convenient for enforcers of the Official Truth: it’s easy to write these people off as nutso, and even easier to tar everyone who questions crucial aspects of the approved narrative with the same broad brush.
More critical minds, however, will not be deterred, and will certainly home in on the many discrepancies and holes in the official version of events, as well as the central implausibility of the whole affair, which is this: those nineteen hijackers simply could not have pulled it off without outside assistance of some sort, by which I mean to say help from a foreign power acting covertly in this country. The sheer complexity of the operation would no doubt have been enough to deter anyone, even al-Qaeda, from launching it in the first place: the sheer odds against it succeeding were simply too great. There had to have been some form of outside assistance – outside al-Qaeda, that is – for the plot to have gone as far as it did right up until zero hour: and I believe there was, because there is plenty of evidence that strongly suggests it.
A few weeks after 9/11, I was the first – and, as far as I know, only – writer to draw attention to the fact that, along with the thousand or so Muslims rounded up in the wake of the attacks, as many as 200 Israelis were also taken into custody by then Attorney General John Ashcroft and the feds. The subhead in the Washington Post story was quite explicit that these guys weren’t picked up for ordinary visa violations: "Government calls Several Cases ‘of Special Interest,’ Meaning Related to Post-Attacks Investigation."
What, I wondered, was the Israeli connection to 9/11? In any case, from that point on it was a legitimate question to ask, and, indeed, unknown to me, the news department over at Fox News was asking it — and, a few weeks after my column appeared, they answered it.
In an astonishing four-part series on Israeli spying in the US, top Fox News reporter Carl Cameron detailed how Israeli agents on American soil had tracked the hijackers, as they moved amongst us, and, in addition, had launched what appeared to be a wide-ranging and quite aggressive intelligence-collection operation directed at US government offices across the country. The allegations contained in his report were denied – and the story (which soon disappeared from the Fox News web site) was never followed up, but Cameron’s reportage haunts us today, and mocks us from the archives where it has been gathering dust for eight years. "Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations," reported Cameron:
"A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins.’ But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’"
Over the next three nights, Cameron detailed the existence of an underground Israeli army in the US armed with a dazzling array of hi-tech spying devices and techniques that enabled them to penetrate our vital communications, including those utilized by law enforcement. His reports also described the consequences for any law enforcement officials who dared raise questions about this: their careers, Cameron told us, would be effectively over.
Cameron’s reporting was viewed by millions. Of course, the Israelis and our own government denied everything. Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, scoffed: Israel, spying on the United States? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?! The US government, for its part, disdained all such reports as "an urban myth." The Israel lobby moved quickly to make sure the Cameron reports were thrown down the Memory Hole, and Cameron was accused of – you guessed it! – "anti-Semitism," on account of having spent time in the Middle East in his youth.
Yet the story persisted. Die Zeit, the respected German weekly, ran a piece entitled "Next Door to Mohammed Atta," in which further evidence the Israelis had been tracking the hijackers quite closely was cited as coming from French intelligence sources. This was followed up by a story in Salon – hardly a bastion of anti-Semitic agitation – which gave a long and detailed account of the Israeli spying operatioCounterpunch, after The Nation spiked it. Reputable newspapers like the Scottish Sunday Herald reported the known facts.
Yet the 9/11 Commission did not so much as mention this aspect of the 9/11 story. Nor has Fox News ever followed up on Cameron’s reporting: they haven’t disavowed it, either. They, along with the rest of the "news" media in this country, simply pretend it never happened. When Arianna Huffington purged me from blogging on the Huffington Post, she cited my own reporting on this story as the reason: "Oh, come on, Dhaaa-link! You know dat’s anti-Semitic!"
Really? Is Fox News anti-Semitic, too? Is Die Zeit? Salon? Le Monde? How about The Forward?
Of course, Arianna is an airhead, but her instinct for self-preservation at all costs – yes, even at the cost of the truth – is indicative of what’s involved here. I was told, before I undertook to challenge the "official" 9/11 story, that I would pay for it by being cast out of the "mainstream" whilst being mercilessly smeared. In any event, since I was never all that interested in being considered "mainstream" – in part because I knew the whole concept of "mainstream" was very over – and because the prospect of being viciously attacked didn’t phase me in the least, I was undeterred. And I remain so to this day.
What I want to know is this: does Fox News stand by Carl Cameron’s reporting on the question of Israeli foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Yes – or no? If so, then what is their loudest mouth – I refer, of course, to Glenn Beck – doing smearing someone as a "Truther" who is asking the same sort of questions asked by Fox News reporter Cameron? If Van Jones must go, because he’s supposedly a "Truther," then Cameron must go, too.
No, I don’t expect an answer to my question any time soon – or, indeed, any time at all. I just want my readers to contemplate the implications of that, and what it says about the veracity of the "official" 9/11 narrative.
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
the.bricoleur
Archon
Posts: 341
Reputation: 8.29
Rate the.bricoleur
making sense of change
 
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #2 on: 2009-09-12 02:54:35 » |
|
Great stuff.
Thanks Hermit.
|
|
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4289
Reputation: 8.78
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #3 on: 2009-09-12 13:51:13 » |
|
The Causes, Aftermath and Lessons of 9/11
[ Hermit : This author has "libertarian" leanings and a decided partiality to Ron Paul. Nonetheless, he does a credible job of providing a sweeping overview of 9/11 and its disastrous after-effects without becoming banal. I have added notes where I was dissatisfied with his summary. ]
[b]Source: Campaign for Liberty
Authors: {/b]Anthony Gregory
[b]Dated: 2009-09-11
America suffered its deadliest terrorist attack eight years ago, on September 11, 2001. Nearly three thousand people, mostly Americans, were murdered, and thousands more wounded. The great institution of American and global capitalism, the World Trade Center, was destroyed.
Americans agree that we should remember 9/11. The current president has declared it a "National Day of Service and Remembrance" on which we should honor community service. This has been criticized by many conservatives as "statist" politicization of that horrific day. Some might respond that it was politicized by the last president too.
Indeed, within 24 hours of the planes hitting the Twin Towers, many Americans mourned but also reacted quickly with their thoughts of the event's political implications. Many on the right said that the attack showed the need for a more aggressive foreign policy. Others on the left said that it was time to stop being critical of big government. Calls for restricting civil liberties could be heard before the Pentagon fire was extinguished, and they continue to this day.
If it is fair game for people to politicize 9/11 in this way, as an argument for more government and less liberty, people should also feel free to advance different conclusions about terrorism. We must never forget that day, and it is also important, if we want to prevent such attacks in the future, to understand what led up to the event and what has transpired since.
Understanding the Atrocity
Why did it happen? One answer given was that the terrorists simply hated America for its freedom. Those who believed this tended to feel that war was the only answer -- war to punish the evildoers and war to rebuild foreign societies so they would be free and no longer resent us. Another answer given was that the terrorists, although murderous criminals, were exploiting genuine grievances that many people in Muslim countries had against U.S. foreign policy.
Osama bin Laden repeatedly stressed the major objections: The U.S. had been supporting apostate dictatorships in the Muslim world, given one-sided support to Israel, occupied holy land such as the Arabian Peninsula, and enforced brutal sanctions on the Iraqi people that had left hundreds of thousands of Muslims, mostly children, dead.
Americans are warned not to forget what happened eight years ago, but we must not assume history began on that date. Those in the Muslim world tend to have a much longer memory.
In 1953, the CIA helped to oust the once-democratically elected leader of Iran, a man who had been featured as Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" just a year before, and replaced him with the corrupt and brutal Shah, a dictator who ushered in a period of torture, terror and mass inflation. Twenty-six years later we saw the "blowback" -- a term the CIA uses to describe the unintended reaction from American policy abroad -- in the form of the Islamic Revolution. Iran fell under the grip of fundamentalists, but most of the nation would not rally against America for purely cultural reasons. What united them was resentment toward the U.S. meddling in their country.
Meanwhile, as part of the Cold War, the U.S. began supporting agitators in Afghanistan so as to incite a Soviet invasion and bring about an overstretch of the Soviet military. Although today most Americans think of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan at the time as purely defensive against Soviet belligerence, President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted this was far from the case in a 1998 interview:[i]"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." These U.S.-allied Mujahideen in Afghanistan were championed as "freedom fighters," but many went on to form the basis of the Taliban and al Qaeda. The Taliban became one of the most brutal and backwards regimes on the planet, but as late as May of 2001, the U.S. was sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban to finance its war on opium. [ Hermit : Even while the USA had earned the enmity and disgust of Afghans because their ongoing sanctions, which always have the effect of starving the poor until the rich surrender, only in Afghanistan there were no rich, and refusal to recognize her Islamic government was costing the lives of children and adults. ]
Throughout the 1980s, the fundamentalist Iranian regime, which had come about in reaction to the U.S.-installed Shah, was seen as the greatest threat in the region. Thus did the United States throw its support behind Saddam Hussein, who, along with his Baathist party, had been a U.S.-sponsored operative for decades in Iraq. An Iran-Iraq war ensued, wherein the U.S. sent weaponry, material support, money and intelligence to the Iraqi dictatorship. At the same time, the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, as well.
In 1990, the U.S. went to war with Iraq after Saddam invaded Kuwait, although a U.S. diplomat had indicated to him that the U.S. would stay out of such a conflict. Propaganda about Kuwaiti babies being torn from their incubators, and an impending threat from Saddam to Saudi Arabia, got most of the American people on board. But it was a short war [ Hermit : If particularly brutal, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers being denied the right to surrender and being murdered, and not just the widespread disregard of the laws preventing attacks on civilian infrastructure, but the active use of such attacks combined with targeted sanctions intended to cause massive death through illness in the hope of triggering insurrection. ] , and by 1992 the popular war was a faded memory as the recession and Perot took the presidential throne from the incumbent commander in chief.
At the end of the war, the U.S. had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and, after destroying much of Iraq's sanitation infrastructure, implemented sanctions to be enforced through the United Nations, that cut off the Iraqi people from getting food and medicine from the outside world. Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. perennially bombed Iraq to enforce "no-fly" zones in the name of protecting the Kurds.
In May of 1996, UN ambassador Madeline Albright, soon to be elevated to become Secretary of State, was asked on 60 Minutes about this the trade sanctions on Iraq. This exchange echoed ominously throughout the Muslim world:Lesley Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it. Most Americans don't know about this exchange, or other grievances foreigners have against the U.S. empire, but the nonchalant way in which Albright weighed the lives of hundreds of thousands of children against the U.S. goal of undermining Saddam's government resonated far and wide. This dismissive attitude toward the foreigners affected by U.S. foreign policy still permeates American policy through and through.
It is such grievances that most directly led to 9/11. This is the conclusion of Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA bin Laden Unit. Robert Pape, who conducted the most comprehensive survey of suicide terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2003, also agrees that the major factor behind such terrorism, by far, is resistance to an occupying power.
This understanding of foreign animosity is completely consistent with the thoughts of candidate George W. Bush, sparring in a presidential debate in October 2000, saying that foreigners resent U.S. intervention in their lands. "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us," Bush said. "If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us."
Candidate Al Gore was clearly much more rhetorically devoted to the U.S. intervening abroad:"Like it or not, we are now...the United States is now the natural leader of the world. All of the other countries are looking to us. Now just because we cannot be involved everywhere, and shouldn't be, doesn't mean that we should shy away from going in anywhere. And we have a fundamental choice to make. Are we going to step up to the plate as a nation, the way we did after World War II, the way that generation of heroes said, okay, the United States is going to be the leader -- and the world benefited tremendously from the courage that they showed in those post-war years." To which Bush replied,"I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the way it's got to be. We can help. And maybe it's just our difference in government, the way we view government. I mean I want to empower people. I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, we do it this way, so should you." After 9/11, the position Gore summarizes here became as popular as ever. But the original George Bush position became very taboo and politically incorrect.
In May 2007, at the Republican presidential debate in North Carolina, Ron Paul defended non-intervention, and was asked if such a posture is still relevant after 9/11. He noted that in order to understand 9/11, we must understand that U.S. foreign policy was a"major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us." When asked if the U.S. "invited" the attacks, Ron Paul answered clearly:"I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary." Candidate Rudy Giuliani responded:"That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th." Ron Paul answered back, explaining that the Golden Rule had something to do with this:"I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?"
That was in 2007, but a similar narrative explaining the motivations for the 9/11 terrorists could be understood in 2001 as well.
The Response to 9/11
What should have been done in response to September 11? Ron Paul recommended the most proper response to an attack by a stateless enemy, one worthy of our republic: Actually target the terror masterminds and principals through the Constitutional process of the Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Treat the terrorists like pirates. Go after them directly, instead of waging endless and unwinnable wars to recreate the Middle East. Another reasonable course of action would have been to recognize the difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda and go after the latter. [ Hermit : Ought to haves are sometimes tricky to deal with, but this one is easy. Love of Ron Paul should not have blinded the writer to the fact that the best response mankind has come up with to individuals who commit crime is policing, and when the crimes or persons are international, then International policing is required. International policing requires extraordinary trust, cooperation and a willingness to accept a common definition of terrorism the tactic, rather than those who violence we disagree with, all of which was possible and offered in the wake of 9/11 and policing had been adopted might well have resulted in a rapid reduction of risk and a much less aggressive world. Unfortunately, the Cheney-Bush maladministration took, so far as possible, the opposite approach, and as their response to 9/11 proved, attacking people in the jurisdiction of others is highly counter-productive as it rapidly leads to a cessation of cooperation and where the government of the target is weak (e.g. Pakistan and Yemen), is almost certain to destabilize that government. Given that in the absence of common definitions and efforts that Ron Paul's recommendation was, essentially, to deploy terrorists against terrorists, Ron Paul's recommendation would likely have come to a similar end as that adopted by Cheney-Bush. ]
There were indeed "training grounds" in Afghanistan, but the planning for 9/11 occurred mostly in the United States and Germany -- the training in Afghanistan was mostly training for ground combat. When the Taliban offered up Osama bin Laden in October 2001, perhaps the U.S. should have negotiated.
But this is not the path we went down. Instead, the Bush administration took us into a war with Afghanistan and then Iraq. Osama bin Laden fled from Afghanistan before the end of 2001, according to most experts, and now the goal has apparently shifted to promoting democracy, stamping out opium and keeping Pakistan in line. Many, many thousands of Afghans have died, millions have been displaced, and 821 Americans have fallen in that theater of war, with no end in sight and no discernable mission.
President Bush also took us to war with Iraq on the basis of propaganda that has turned out to be totally false: Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, no operational ties to al Qaeda and no involvement with 9/11. [ Hermit : Important to recognize that this was an illegal war of an aggression and the propaganda was created by the US government, in other words the Cheney-Bush knew, or should have known, it was propaganda and as such the war against Iraq constituted "the highest crime". Important to recognise that the Obama administration has become complicit in covering up this crime, probably because senior Democrats were in no small way supportive of the attack on Iraq. ] The declared American goal soon became one of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. A socialist Iraqi constitution was drafted and a new U.S.-allied regime in Iraq with friendly ties to Iran and deference to Sharia law was born. [ Hermit : Note that the US attacked the most secular state in the gulf, one that offered education and legal equality to all its citizens, as well as a near flat income distribution and, prior to the first gulf war, one of the highest per capita incomes in the Gulf, and some of the most modern infrastructure and support, and has converted it into yet another unstable thuggist den of fervid fundamentalists out to steal all that they can and absent infrastructure or the means to pay for replacing it. In fact, it has been rebuilt into something remarkably American with added inequality. ] Alliances would shift over the next several years, culminating in the celebrated U.S. "surge" of 2007 that cynically involved paying off Iraqi militias to fight "al Qaeda in Iraq" rather than U.S. forces. Such bribery, as well as the fact that the Sunnis had effectively lost the civil war by then and Iranian intervention had reduced Sadrist belligerence, was probably what really stemmed the bloodshed temporarily. [ Hermit : There is no probably about it. ]
More than four thousand Americans have been killed, tens of thousands wounded. Independent estimates of Iraqi dead range from a hundred thousand to a million. [ Hermit : Surplus deaths are closer to 2 million. We should also take into account the level of malnutrition and number of refugees we have created both of which are obscene. ]
And of course, Osama bin Laden has yet to be found. This should be no surprise. As early as March of 2002, only six months after 9/11, President Bush made it clear that finding Osama was no longer a major priority:"As I say, we hadn't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, you know, again, I don't know where he is. I'll repeat what I said: I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But, you know, once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became -- we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al Qaeda killers anymore. And if we find a training camp, we'll take care of it -- either we will or our friends will."
But Bush did say he was "deeply concerned about Iraq, and so should the American people be concerned about Iraq. And so should people who love freedom be concerned about Iraq."
Osama is not in Afghanistan. Saddam, who did not turn out to be nearly the threat he was made out to be, has been dead for years, and Iraq never attacked or plausibly threatened to attack America. Why are U.S. forces still in either country? Neither nation is going to be turned into the type of democracy imagined by the neoconservatives in the foreseeable future. A few more years and a few thousand more American deaths isn't going to make or break those countries, and practically everyone knows it. There are, however, far more potential recruits for the anti-American terrorist cause than ever before, and according to our own government, al Qaeda and the Taliban are more closely linked than ever.
Such paradoxes typify current U.S. policy. In Iraq, the U.S. supported the Islamists who soon came to head up the new Iraqi government and ally it with the interests of Iran. In the midst of the civil war that followed the U.S. invasion, the balance of power between factions has led to bizarre de facto alliances with the U.S. The American mission in Iraq became increasingly unclear over time, as the administration boasted a meaningless "handover" in April 2004, prided itself on the elections of 2005 that were followed by mass violence, ignored the Baker report and launched its "surge," paid off the Sunni militants that had previously offered a ceasefire in exchange for a bribe, and eventually capitulated to the Iraqi government with the Status of Forces Agreement last year, which gives Obama a couple more years to withdraw before we know whether we're leaving at all. Meanwhile, the U.S. is supporting the two major Kurdish factions in the North, who are united and at relative peace now, but may find themselves at war with the Iraqi government over oil-rich Kirkuk in the future. Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. backed the Kurds against Saddam with its "No-Fly Zones," even as America also supported the Turks against the Kurds.
The foreign policy paradoxes after 9/11 get stranger than that. The U.S. has apparently been supporting the fanatical Mujahideen-e-Khalq in Iraq, an Iranian Marxist faction that had been allied with the Atatollah Khomeni, only to then side with Saddam Hussein against Iran. In Pakistan, America is reportedly backing Jundallah, an organization with probable ties to al Qaeda and likely once led by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, 9-11 mastermind.
What's more, all this violent intervention is counterproductive to American security. Michael Scheuer has said that U.S. foreign policy has played right into the hands of America's enemies. Although Osama's longterm goal is to get the U.S. out of the Middle East, his strategy to do this was to lure us into a counterinsurgency sand trap, bleed us dry and bankrupt us. So long as the wars continue, Osama will be winning.
The Post-9/11 Assault on Liberty
In light of the attacks, most Americans came together, and most rallied behind the president and federal government. Polls taken in the weeks after 9/11 revealed a dramatic resurgence in trust and approval in the federal government. This was despite the fact that 9/11 was the largest government failure in living memory. The U.S. government had spent about forty billion a year in intelligence gathering and processing, and failed to prevent the attacks.
For one example of many mishaps, the FBI refused to allow a criminal investigation of two of the hijackers weeks before 9/11. A high official at the agency denied a warrant to Minneapolis agents who wanted to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer. He had come to flight school, paid cash and wanted to learn how to fly a 747, but not take off and land, and had lots of fishy questions about the airplane's mechanics and how much damage could be expected from its crashing. The FBI, misapplying the FISA law, denied the search warrant in the face of tons of evidence satisfying the standards under FISA, even after a flight school official pointed out to the FBI "that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb," and after one of the head Minneapolis agents warned the main FBI office that Moussaoiu might "take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center."
This was just one mishap out of many. As Peter Lance has reported, the FBI had been infiltrating al Qaeda operatives in the United States since 1989. Intelligence failure after intelligence failure, in the midst of the assassination of Rabbi Kahane in 1990, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, the 1998 African embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, typified the gross ineptitude of America's massively financed and empowered federal intelligence apparatus prior to 9/11.
But one ironic result from 9/11 has been that, insofar as the terrorists truly hate our freedom, the government has given the terrorists what they wanted. Our freedom has been under continual attack for the last eight years in the name of fighting terrorism. While proponents of a militaristic society do not want to sacrifice the interventionist foreign policy that motivates America's enemies, they do seem willing to sacrifice those very liberties they claim are the real reason we are hated. However, whereas relinquishing the empire, despite being agreeable with some of our enemies, would be of no long-term harm to our country (indeed, a constitutional republic cannot survive long as an empire), the sacrifice of our freedoms has been something that only America's enemies should want to see.
First came a roundup of hundreds of suspected terrorists and "material witnesses," now long forgotten, who were denied due process for months. [ Hermit : Refer [ Church of Virus BBS, General, Free For All, Big up, USA !, Reply #30 ] ] Next came the Patriot Act, which empowered the federal government to spy on communications with even fewer safeguards than existed under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, itself a deviation from Constitutional due process. The Act also allowed for sneak and peak surveillance -- searching people's property without letting them know for months on end -- and the issuance of National Security Letters that violated the First Amendment by prohibiting their recipients from informing anyone, including their own lawyer, that they got them. This provision was overturned as unconstitutional in 2004.
In April 2004, Bush asserted:"[ B ]y the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution." And yet, at the end of 2005, we learned that the National Security Agency, an organ of the military, had been spying on American telecommunications without even the safeguards guaranteed by the newly amended FISA. This illegal surveillance was legalized -- at least by statute; the program is still unconstitutional -- last year, with Senator Obama voting for it.
Shortly after 9/11, we saw the birth of a detention policy completely at odds with the principles of habeas corpus. Citizens were stripped of their right to a trial, and foreigners were rounded up and deprived of both the protections of prisoners of war and the legal privileges afforded to criminals. The Geneva Conventions and Bill of Rights were abandoned. Thousands of foreigners have been unjustly detained and tortured, many who were apprehended by warlords in exchange for a cash reward. Hundreds were released from Guantanamo when it became clear they were innocent of anything but being in the wrong place (Afghanistan or Pakistan) at the wrong time (after the U.S. had gone to war). This was after officials had assured the American public that only the "worst of the worst" were being detained. While the Court has extended some protections to Guantanamo, President Obama is now seeking to preserve indefinite and lawless detention at Bagram in Afghanistan.
A policy of "extraordinary renditioning" came to life, whereby suspects are transferred to foreign regimes like Syria or Morocco to be interrogated brutally. This policy has ensnared a number of innocent people, such as Canadian citizen Maher Ahar. Under Obama, renditioning has apparently been expanded to include non-terror suspects.
All-out war has been waged on the Bill of Rights since 9/11, accompanied by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the militarization of domestic police, the nationalization of airline security (which fails to keep weapons off planes but harasses normal Americans daily), a "no-fly list" that prevents more than a million Americans from traveling freely (which some in the current administration want to use to disarm those Americans), "fusion centers" that chill free political speech, and a ridiculous color-coded terror alert system that we now know was a political farce. A series of supposed foiled terror plots have turned out to be similarly dubious.
Economic freedom has also taken a hit. We have seen financial privacy eroded in the name of stopping terrorism and a military response to 9/11 that has cost, in direct terms, at least a trillion dollars, and whose long-term costs are probably many times that. Furthermore, the fog of war has allowed the domestic leviathan to advance. Under the false patriotism, President Bush was able to push through his expansion of Medicare, his enormous farm bill, and record-busting deficits with a Republican Congress afraid to confront their president at wartime. The monetary and fiscal response to 9/11 coincided with the economic response to the dotcom bust: Credit expansion to keep Americans shopping, building and buying homes and living it up, so as to reinflate the economic bubble, only to see it all collapse last year and bring on the greatest economic depression of a lifetime.
Moving Forward
It is considered crass in some circles to point out all this horror that surrounds the events of 9/11, both before and after. Yet to truly honor those Americans who were peacefully living their lives, working in the great system of global capitalism, only to be slaughtered on that Tuesday morning eight years ago, we must appreciate why it happened, what the full implications of the attack and the U.S. response to it have been, and what will truly keep Americans safer in the future. The answer is not to keep sacrificing the freedoms and values that some Americans believe are the reasons we were attacked. The answer is to abandon the policy of foreign intervention and rely on our liberties -- our right to bear arms, for example -- to protect us. [ Hermit : This shows logical failure and the irrational clewing to dogma in the absence of evidence or in the face of contrary evidence. As the collapse of the ex Soviet states proved, the right, granted or assumed, to bear arms does not help individuals or groups as the social structure implodes. Arms and the right to bear them do not provide needed but absent education, funds, trade, food or energy, and those who bear arms are much more likely to become thugs or corpses. The right to bear arms has not aided Americans as they have fallen behind the Europeans in every positive life indicator, even as Europe has assimilated the economic black holes of the ex Soviet states. ]
The U.S. has been an interventionist empire under both parties for the better part of a century. September 11 occurred after years of such interventions. The current administration is virtually identical to the last administration in clinging to this counterproductive and unconstitutional foreign policy. At the core of this continuity is a philosophical problem, a dedication to intervention in our national culture that must be questioned and confronted. Our true hope for security and freedom lies in restoring the constitutional limits on presidential power, bringing the troops home from around the world, and restoring the republic. [ Hermit : Perhaps recognizing that the Republic always was a mirage with more myth than substance, and to see past outdated labels, would be helpful in learning to think past the death of the old and to build a better future. ]
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
MoEnzyme
Anarch
Gender: 
Posts: 2256
Reputation: 3.73
Rate MoEnzyme
infidel lab animal
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #4 on: 2009-09-12 16:22:46 » |
|
Here's how I remember 9-11 . . . lock the cockpit doors.
|
I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4289
Reputation: 8.78
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #5 on: 2009-09-13 20:04:43 » |
|
Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?
[ Hermit : Interesting speculation here. Might explain a lot. Including why the US couldn't accept Afghanistan's offer to hand-over bin Laden in exchange for evidence of his guilt, why he repeatedly rejected involvement, and why bin Laden has been indicted for attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, but not in the US. ]
Source: :Mail On-line
Authors: :Sue Reid
Dated: :2009-09-11
Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?
The last time we heard a squeak from him was on June 3 this year.
The world's most notorious terrorist outsmarted America by releasing a menacing message as Air Force One touched down on Saudi Arabian soil at the start of Barack Obama's first and much vaunted Middle East tour.
Even before the new President alighted at Riyadh airport to shake hands with Prince Abdullah, Bin Laden's words were being aired on TV, radio and the internet across every continent.
It was yet another propaganda coup for the 52-year-old Al Qaeda leader. In the audiotape delivered to the Arab news network Al Jazeera, Bin Laden said that America and her Western allies were sowing seeds of hatred in the Muslim world and deserved dire consequences.
It was the kind of rant we have heard from him before, and the response from British and U.S. intelligence services was equally predictable.
They insisted that the details on the tape, of the President's visit and other contemporary events, proved that the mastermind of 9/11, America's worst ever terrorist atrocity, was still alive - and that the hunt for him must go on.
Bin Laden has always been blamed for orchestrating the horrific attack - in which nearly 3,000 people perished - eight years ago this week. President George W. Bush made his capture a national priority, infamously promising with a Wild West flourish to take him 'dead or alive'.
The U.S. State Department offered a reward of $50million for his whereabouts. The FBI named him one of their ten 'most wanted' fugitives, telling the public to watch out for a left-handed, grey-bearded gentleman who walks with a stick.
Yet this master terrorist remains elusive. He has escaped the most extensive and expensive man-hunt in history, stretching across Waziristan, the 1,500 miles of mountainous badlands on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Undeterred, Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.
This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.
Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?
What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?
Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.
Of course, there have been any number of conspiracy theories concerning 9/11, and it could be this is just another one.
But the weight of opinion now swinging behind the possibility that Bin Laden is dead - and the accumulating evidence that supports it - makes the notion, at the very least, worthy of examination.
The theory first received an airing in the American Spectator magazine earlier this year when former U.S. foreign intelligence officer and senior editor Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, stated bluntly: 'All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.'
Prof Codevilla pointed to inconsistencies in the videos and claimed there have been no reputable sightings of Bin Laden for years (for instance, all interceptions by the West of communications made by the Al Qaeda leader suddenly ceased in late 2001).
Prof Codevilla asserted: 'The video and audio tapes alleged to be Osama's never convince the impartial observer,' he asserted. 'The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between the colours and styles of his beard are small stuff.'
There are other doubters, too. Professor Bruce Lawrence, head of Duke University's religious studies' department and the foremost Bin Laden expert, argues that the increasingly secular language in the video and audio tapes of Osama (his earliest ones are littered with references to God and the Prophet Mohammed) are inconsistent with his strict Islamic religion, Wahhabism.
He notes that, on one video, Bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabi followers.
This week, still more questions have been raised with the publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?
Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, former emeritus professor at California's Claremont School of Theology, it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his supposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West.
The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan.
His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom.
The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the West to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. The purpose? To stoke up waning support for the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To understand Griffin's thesis, we must remember the West's reaction to 9/11, that fateful sunny September day in 2001. Within a month, on Sunday, October 7, the U.S. and Britain launched massive retaliatory air strikes in the Tora Bora region where they said 'prime suspect' Bin Laden was living 'as a guest of Afghanistan'.
This military offensive ignored the fact that Bin Laden had already insisted four times in official Al Qaeda statements made to the Arab press that he played no role in 9/11.
Indeed, on the fourth occasion, on September 28 and a fortnight after the atrocity, he declared emphatically: 'I have already said I am not involved. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge... nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.'
Within hours of the October 7 strikes by the U.S. on Tora Bora, Bin Laden made his first ever appearance on video tape. Dressed in Army fatigues, and with an Islamic head-dress, he had an assault rifle propped behind him in a broadly lit mountain hideout. Significantly, he looked pale and gaunt.
Although he called President George W. Bush 'head of the infidels' and poured scorn on the U.S., he once again rejected responsibility for 9/11.
'America was hit by God in one of its softest spots. America is full of fear, from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.'
Then came a second videotape on November 3, 2001. Once again, an ailing Bin Laden lashed out at the United States. He urged true Muslims to celebrate the attacks - but did not at any time acknowledge he had been involved in the atrocity.
And then there was silence until December 13, 2001 - the date Griffin claims Bin Laden died. That very day, the U.S. Government released a new video of the terror chief. In this tape, Bin Laden contradicted all his previous denials, and suddenly admitted to his involvement in the atrocity of 9/11.
The tape had reportedly been found by U.S. troops in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, after anti-Taliban forces took over the city. A label attached to it claimed that it had been made on November 9, 2001.
The tape shows Bin Laden talking with a visiting sheik. In it, he clearly states that he not only knew about the 9/11 atrocities in advance, but had planned every detail personally.
What manna for the Western authorities! This put the terrorist back in the frame over 9/11. The Washington Post quoted U.S. officials saying that the video 'offers the most convincing evidence of a connection between Bin Laden and the September 11 attacks'.
A euphoric President Bush added: 'For those who see this tape, they realise that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, but he has no conscience and no soul.'
In London, Downing Street said that the video was 'conclusive proof of his involvement'. The then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, added: 'There is no doubt it is the real thing. People can see Bin Laden there, making those utterly chilling words of admission about his guilt for organising the atrocities of September 11.'
Yet Professor Griffin claims this 'confessional' video provokes more questions than answers. For a start, the Bin Laden in this vital film testimony looks different.
He is a weighty man with a black beard, not a grey one. His pale skin had suddenly become darker, and he had a different shaped nose. His artistic hands with slender fingers had transformed into those of a pugilist. He looked in exceedingly good health.
Furthermore, Bin Laden can be seen writing a note with his right hand, although he is left-handed. Bizarrely, too, he makes statements about 9/11 which Griffin claims would never have come from the mouth of the real Bin Laden - a man with a civil engineering degree who had made his fortune (before moving into terrorism) from building construction in the Middle East.
For example, the Al Qaeda leader trumpets that far more people died in 9/11 than he had expected. He goes on: 'Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the explosion from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. That is all we had hoped for.' (In reality the Twin Towers' completely fell down).
The words of the true Bin Laden? No, says Griffin, because of the obvious mistakes. 'Given his experience as a contractor, he would have known the Twin Towers were framed with steel, not iron,' he says.
'He would also known that steel and iron do not begin to melt until they reach 2,800 deg F. Yet a building fire fed by jet fuel is a hydrocarbon fire, and could not have reached above 1,800 deg F.'
Griffin, in his explosive book, says this tape is fake, and he goes further.
'A reason to suspect that all of the post-2001 Bin Laden tapes are fabrications is that they often appeared at times that boosted the Bush presidency or supported a claim by its chief 'war on terror' ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
'The confession tape came exactly when Bush and Blair had failed to prove Bin Laden's responsibility for 9/11 and both men were trying to win international public support, particularly in the Islamic world, for the anti-terrorist campaign.'
Griffin suggests that Western governments used highly sophisticated, special effects film technology to morph together images and vocal recordings of Bin Laden.
So if they are fakes, why has Al Qaeda kept quiet about it? And what exactly happened to the real Bin Laden?
The answer to the first question may be that the amorphous terrorist organisation is happy to wage its own propaganda battle in the face of waning support - and goes along with the myth that its charismatic figurehead is still alive to encourage recruitment to its cause.
As for the matter of what happened to him, hints of Bin Laden's kidney failure, or that he might be dead, first appeared on January 19, 2002, four months after 9/11.
This was when Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told America's news show CNN: 'I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. The images of him show he is extremely weak.'
In his book, Professor Griffin also endorses this theory. He says Bin Laden was treated for a urinary infection, often linked to kidney disease, at the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, two months before 9/11. At the same time, he ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to Afghanistan.
How could Bin Laden, on the run in snowy mountain caves, have used the machine that many believe was essential to keep him alive? Doctors whom Griffin cites on the subject think it would have been impossible.
He would have needed to stay in one spot with a team of medics, hygienic conditions, and a regular maintenance programme for the dialysis unit itself.
And what of the telling, small news item that broke on December 26, 2001 in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd? It said a prominent official of the Afghan Taliban had announced that Osama Bin Laden had been buried on or about December 13.
'He suffered serious complications and died a natural, quiet death. He was buried in Tora Bora, a funeral attended by 30 Al Qaeda fighters, close members of his family and friends from the Taliban. By the Wahhabi tradition, no mark was left on the grave,' said the report.
The Taliban official, who was not named, said triumphantly that he had seen Bin Laden's face in his shroud. 'He looked pale, but calm, relaxed and confident.'
It was Christmas in Washington DC and London and the report hardly got a mention. Since then, the Bin Laden tapes have emerged with clockwork regularity as billions have been spent and much blood spilt on the hunt for him.
Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West's 'war on terror'. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Blunderov
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.63
Rate Blunderov
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
|
|
Re:Debunking 9/11
« Reply #6 on: 2009-09-14 08:17:40 » |
|
Quote from: Hermit on 2009-09-13 20:04:43
Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West's 'war on terror'. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?
|
[Blunderov] Something which I have long suspected. See Goldstein Speaks
Both sides puttings words into the mouth of a long dead man?
Oh how we laughed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
