- Whether they were genuinely the desperate acts of disgruntled
foreign terrorists or the cynical, murderous ploys of high-level agents
provocateur, the events of 9/11/2001 were a consequence of America's thoughtless,
oppressive and often murderous foreign policy.
Be clear about this: we don't know who planned these acts, because adequate
investigations have been thwarted at every turn by the highest levels of
the American government. That in itself says a great deal. But either way,
whether the plan forged in a cell of hairy malcontents in Hamburg, Germany
was actually generated from a high-tech cavern in Afghanistan or a boring
conference room in Langley, Virginia, the result was the same, and the
blame is the same: American foreign policy inflicted this great wound on
the American people.
Our unwillingness to come to grips with this painful realization guarantees
that we will suffer more tragedies of this type and magnitude in the future,
because we simply refuse to see the light. We simply refuse to admit our
guilty sins of indifference and not really caring about what happens to
other people. We refuse to admit that we don't mind killing a few people
if we're going to be financially rewarded for it. Think lower gas prices.
Today we reopen this great wound one year after truly evil deeds were perpetrated
upon humanity. Great as the pain may be, reopening this wound must not
be a cause to stop thinking, both about the true motivations for the attacks
and the inconsistencies in subsequent explanations. Because to shroud ourselves
in pseudo-patriotism and rely on steadfast solidarity will simply not the
get the job done if we are ever to find out why this happened.
We need to ask questions that are very hard to ask.
Why, with so much time between knowledge of the hijackings and the time
of impact, were these planes not intercepted by the greatest military defense
force in the world? Especially the Pentagon plane, which crashed 45 minutes
AFTER the first plane in New York. Why did NORAD not immediately scramble
fighter jets when it learned the first plane had been hijacked? One year
later, we have had no satisfactory answer to this question.
Why did our president say, on two different occasions, that he saw the
first plane strike the World Trade Center when it was not televised? And
why did he keep reading a meaningless story to schoolchildren when he knew
both towers had been hit? When he knew the nation was under attack. What
was he trying to prove? That he didn't know?
Why have we never seen a single picture of the plane that supposedly hit
the Pentagon?
Why was the invasion of Afghanistan, which had been planned earlier in
the summer, called a retaliation for the terrrorist attacks if it already
had been planned?
Why, in subsequent analyses, is it now obvious that numerous warnings forwarded
from Russia, Israel, Egypt and many other intelligence services were ignored
or disregarded by American security forces? Did somebody in the highest
levels of the American government want this to happen? Why were there deliberate
coverups of clues by the FBI?
Why was the Patriot Act passed so quickly? Why didn't more people point
out that this act absolutely trashed our Constitution? And why did so many
of our elected representatives sign this bill without even reading it?
In my opinion, the Patriot Act was passed so the government could prevent
information from participants in its own plot to be revealed to the public,
which is why all these trials of so-called terror suspects need to be completely
public, lest certain government criminals get away with their dirty deeds.
What are we fighting for if the Constitution is no longer in force? What
country are we living in?
Why did someone call San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and tell him not
to fly on September 11?
Why were so many employees of the World Trade Center not at their desks
that morning?
Why did a Brooklyn student tell his friends in the weeks before that in
a few weeks, those towers would be gone?
Why did a South Carolina National Guardsman recount a story from July that
his superiors told him there would be a military exercise in September
that they would all have to be ready for?
Why does President Bush insist he had no prior knowledge when there is
so much evidence to the contrary?
Why don't newspapers and TV commentators talk about the longstanding relationship
of the Bush and bin Ladin families? Or the ties to Adolf Hitler of the
president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, in the early 1940s? Why was the
bin Ladin family flown out of the country when all planes in the country
were grounded?
Why did the American government have the names of all the hijackers two
days after the attacks but has had virtually no new intelligence since?
Why was Atta's passport found in the street near the World Trade Center,
or another hijacker's Qu'ran found left in a parked car at Logan Airport?
Why doesn't President Bush admit that Americans financed Saddam Hussein,
al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden as allies to build them up to the point where
they could become suitable enemies, much in the same way that Ford and
Rockefeller sent money to the Bolsheviks and Hitler earlier in the last
century?
Why did the World Trade Center towers collapse the way they did, with perfect
symmetry, as if demolished? Why did three World Trade Center buildings
collapse, when only two were hit by jetliners? Why was molten steel found
glowing weeks after the attacks at the bottom of all three? And why were
the biggest seismic spikes in the area at the time recorded BEFORE the
buildings actually fell to the ground?
These are all signs, clues, portents, that potentially indicate a false
story has been told.
And there are hundreds more questions like this, ranging from possible
remote control of the airliners, that questionable fate of the plane that
crashed in Pennsylvania, Taliban fighters escaping Afghanistan in a U.S.
airlift ... on and on.
The only thing now certain about the attacks of 9/11/2001 is that American
public officials have lied not only about the events themselves but about
their responses to those events.
One thing certainly untrue was the statement of George W. Bush that the
attacks happened because terrorists hate our freedom. If the foreign terrorist
motivation is actually true, they didn't attack because they hate our freedom;
they attacked because they hate the things that America is doing to their
homelands, most notably, support for anti-democratic dictatorships in Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan.
And if the insider, U.S. government connection turns out to be true, this
is still a consequence of our own misguided, murderous foreign, only with
3,000 plus Americans caught in the crossfire and blown to bits as a sacrifice
to a small minority of well-connected bigots who wanted to " and have
" turned America into a full-blown police state.
On this first anniversary of the tragedies, now is not the time to mourn;
now is the time to think, and ask questions. This is what all those dead
people would want us to do, and God help us if their deaths were in vain,
as so many people in power want them to be.
Don't let their deaths be in vain. We need to expose this beast that threatens
us all.
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