- At first, it all seemed so obvious. It was those Islamic
terrorists. Osama
- bin Laden. Mullah Omar. George W. Bush had nothing to
do
- with it ... did he?
President George W. Bush continued speaking to kids after the attack ...
hmm.
-
- "The right wing benefited so much from September
11 that, if I were still a conspiratorialist, I would believe they'd done
it." --Norman Mailer
-
-
- When the paladin of Camelot joined the fray, I knew 9/11
had become the Kennedy Assassination of the 21st century -- a real-life
X-Files episode occurring before my eyes. Like those X-Files accounts of
aliens living in oil deposits, this was a story with such staggering implications
the mainstream media are loath to go near it. The question isn't who killed
the president -- it's who piloted the airplanes that slammed into the World
Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvanian countryside.
Just as there remains lingering doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald fired a burst
of fatally accurate shots from the Texas Book Depository, so there is skepticism
that cells of Islamic terrorists secretly coordinated and simultaneously
commandeered four commercial jetliners.
The culprit responsible for the Sept. 11 attack is now rumoured to be the
same one who lurked behind the grassy knoll: the oil-dependent U.S. military-industrial
complex.
Not everyone is ready to accept this -- a substitute teacher in North Vancouver's
Sherwood Park elementary school has been called on the mat for suggesting
to Grade 5 students the Central Intelligence Agency might have been involved
in 9/11.
And at last count, there were a dozen U.S. Congressional Committees investigating
the tragedies and how such an intelligence and security breakdown was allowed
to occur.
But President George W. Bush and his right-hand man, Vice President Dick
Cheney, have taken the unprecedented step of trying to restrict those investigations,
pouring fuel on the simmering conspiracy theories being propagated in alternative
publications, on wingnut Web sites and among some serious media outlets.
In Germany, a former minister of technology, Andreas von Buelow, made headlines
when in an interview he dismissed the U.S. government's explanation that
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is responsible for the attacks. His
own explanation implicated the White House.
"I wonder why many questions are not asked," von Buelow said.
"For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies let
the fighter planes stay on the ground; 48 hours later, however, the FBI
presented a list of suicide attackers. Within 10 days, it emerged that
seven of them were still alive."
In Britain, a flight engineer has published a detailed paper asserting
the U.S. took the joysticks out of the pilots' hands using a method of
remote control developed by the American military in the 1970s.
In the U.S. and Canada, independent publisher and editor Mike Ruppert (a
former LAPD cop who hates the CIA) has drawn huge crowds to his two-hour
lecture in which he states baldly that the U.S. government was complicit
in the attacks and had foreknowledge. He opens his documentary presentation
with an offer of $1,000 US to anyone who can prove any of his sources were
misrepresented or inauthentic.
A former U.S. government agent also has given interviews claiming the CIA
has been dealing with Osama bin Laden since 1987.
According to those who do not believe in The Lone Gunman, the truth is
as plain as the nose on your face: Sept. 11's terrorist acts were planned
and paid for by the CIA to enable the Bush Administration to "legitimately"
bomb Afghanistan into submission on behalf of the oil industry.
After all, everyone knows the Bush family has strong and long acknowledged
ties to the oil industry, as do other senior members of the administration.
Cheney until recently was president of a company servicing the oil patch.
National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice was a manager for Chevron. Commerce
and Energy Secretaries Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham worked for Tom
Brown, another oil giant.
Follow the money, as they say, and you'll find the smoking gun.
Under this scenario, conspiracy theorists say a pliant Afghan regime was
essential because of plans to pipe central Asian oil across Afghanistan.
And there is a harvest of coincidence and contradiction to feed such imaginings.
Consider first that the intelligence breakdown that led to 9/11 appears
to have been a consequence of the Bush Administration telling the Federal
Bureau of Investigation to back off on its investigation of Middle Eastern
terrorism. A senior FBI investigator resigned from the agency, noisily
claiming its main obstacle in the investigation was Big Oil's political
influence. In an ironic twist of fate, the agent died in the World Trade
Center.
(Fox Mulder, was that you? Is that why they cancelled the series?)
There also are recurring reports the CIA station chief in Dubai met with
bin Laden only seven weeks before 9/11 while he was laid up for surgery.
(The CIA denies this, but of course you can't believe anything it says.)
Now think about this for a second: The Independent in London questions
how Bush could claim in two public appearances to have seen the first plane
hit the first tower long before any such TV footage was broadcast. The
paper also asks why Dubya continued sitting with elementary school students
after the second tower was hit and he'd been told, "America is under
attack."
Very mysterious, when standard procedure for such a situation is to whisk
the president away to safety. Unless -- and here is the nub -- unless he
knew something more than we did that morning. As the Independent asked,
"What television station was HE watching?"
This is rich stuff for those who see Them under the bed, especially since
the financial miasma melds nicely with the already swirling rumour and
insinuation.
In the days before the attacks, there was unusually heavy trading in airline
and related stocks using a market tactic called a "put option"
that essentially bets that a stock will decline in value. If you were Osama,
buying puts would be a great way to boost the value of your investment
portfolio.
And sure enough, unusually high numbers of put options were purchased in
early September for the stocks of AMR Corp. and UAL Corp., the parents
of American and United -- each of which had two planes hijacked. The U.S.
government is now investigating suspicious trading in 38 companies directly
affected by the events of Sept. 11.
The initial survey of beneficiaries, however, turns out not to include
one tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned, Allah-loving, Saudi-born sheik. Mainly
the profiteers were blue-chip, establishment, red-white-and-blue Americans,
some of whom were tenants in the collapsed twin towers, such as Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter, Lehman Brothers and the Bank of America, major airlines,
cruise companies, General Motors Corp., Raytheon and others. Several insurance
companies are also on the 38-name list U.S. and Canadian financial firms
were asked to review and compare with their records for any unusual patterns.
(Which may say more about who plays the market than anything else, but
why quibble with the quixotic?)
Cynics are also questioning the incredible speed with which evidence in
the WTC collapse is being destroyed. Never in the history of fire investigations,
they say, has evidence been destroyed before exhaustive investigations
are complete.
(Say what? Two skyscrapers' worth of debris should be warehoused?)
And then there were the curious developments swirling around the anthrax
public health hysteria triggered shortly after 9/11. Even dullards can
appreciate that anthrax sent to a top Democrat and to the U.S. media helped
unify the nation behind the war effort while literally shutting down Congress
-- a remarkably useful outcome for Dubya and his gang.
Indeed, specialists in biological warfare say the anthrax appears to be
a U.S. military strain and the culprit a disgruntled American scientist
who possesses a rare combination of laboratory skills that make him (they
believe it's a man) relatively easy to identify. Hmmm.
And who didn't smell a bad odour two weeks ago when Tennessee driver's
licence examiner Katherine Smith died in Memphis under "most unusual
and suspicious" circumstances. One day before her arraignment on charges
she conspired to provide phoney licences to five Arabs tied by the FBI
to the 9/11 attacks, her car crashed into a utility pole. The car was only
slightly damaged, the gas tank was full and intact, but the vehicle was
immediately engulfed in flames.
As one report pointed out, Smith and the car interior apparently were doused
with gasoline, which would certainly qualify in my book as at least "suspicious."
And Memphis ... Memphis? Wasn't that the same place a noted Harvard bio-warfare
expert "fell" off a bridge in December?
Scully!
The truth is out there. I know it. You too can help find it.
If you would like an activist kit to get involved in urging a full public
investigation of 9/11 and its aftermath, reply to findtruth 40@hotmail.com
with "Send kit."
But be warned.
The Pentagon has just established a new Office of Strategic Influence that
calls for the planting of false stories in the foreign press, phoney e-mails
from disguised addresses and other covert activities to manipulate public
opinion.
This could be one of them.
-
-
- Ian Mulgrew claims to be a Vancouver Sun reporter.
-
- © Copyright 2002 Vancouver
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