- On Sept. 7, National Public Radio reported that Muslims
in the Middle East were beginning to believe that the 9-11 attacks on
the WTC and Pentagon were false flag operations committed by some part
of the U.S. and-or Israeli government.
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- It was beyond the imagination of the NPR reporter and
producer that there could be any substance to these beliefs, which were
attributed to the influence of books by U.S. and European authors sold
in bookstores in Egypt. NPR's concern was that books by Western authors
questioning the origin of the 9-11 attack have the undesirable result
of removing guilt from Muslims' shoulders.
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- The NPR reporter, Ursula Lindsey, said that "here
in the U.S., most people have little doubt about what happened during
the 2001 attacks." NPR's assumption that the official 9-11 story
is the final word is uninformed. Polls show that 36 percent of Americans
and more than 50 percent of New Yorkers lack confidence in the 9-11 commission
report. Many 9-11 families who lost relatives in the attacks are unsatisfied
with the official story.
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- Why are the U.S. media untroubled that there has been
no independent investigation of 9-11?
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- Why are the media unconcerned that the rules governing
preservation of forensic evidence were not followed by federal authorities?
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- Why do the media brand skeptics of the official line
"conspiracy theorists" and "kooks"?
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- What is wrong with debate and listening to both sides
of the defining issue of our time? If the official line is so correct
and defensible, what does it have to fear from skeptics?
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- Obviously, a great deal considering the iron curtain
that has been erected to protect the official line from independent examination.
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- Some may think that the 9-11 commission report was an
independent investigation, and others will protest that we have the National
Institute of Standards and Technology analysis, which explains the collapse
of the Twin Towers as a result of airliner impact and fire.
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- The 9-11 commission was a political commission run by
Bush administration insider Philip Zelikow. The National Institute of
Standards and Technology is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce,
the head of which is a member of President Bush's Cabinet.
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- Zelikow was a member of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board, a neoconservative stronghold. In February 2005, Zelikow
was appointed counselor of the U.S. Department of State. Obviously, there
was zero possibility that the 9-11 commission would hold any part of the
Bush administration accountable for the numerous failures of U.S. government
agencies on Sept. 11, much less would the commission investigate for any
complicity.
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- If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared
to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible
to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations
on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations
of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the
people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of
physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an
attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure
of government agencies.
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- Over the past six years, the ranks of distinguished skeptics
of the 9-11 storyline have grown enormously. The ranks include distinguished
scientists, engineers and architects, intelligence officers, air traffic
controllers, military officers and generals, including the former commanding
general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, former presidential
appointees and members of the White House staff in Republican administrations,
Top Gun fighter pilots and career airline pilots who say that the flying
attributed to the 9-11 hijackers is beyond the skills of America's best
pilots, and foreign dignitaries.
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- Dr. Andreas von Buelow, former West German minister of
research and technology and former state secretary of the federal ministry
of defense, said: "The planning of the attacks was technically and
organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four airliners within
a few minutes and within one hour to drive them into their targets with
complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable, without years-long
support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry."
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- Gen. Leonid Ivashov, chief of staff of the Russian armed
forces, said: "Only secret services and their current chiefs - or
those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations
- have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such
magnitude.
-
-
- ?
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- ... Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida cannot be the organizers
nor the performers of the Sept. 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary
organization, resources or leaders."
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- Americans might concede that it is unusual that U.S.
airport security would fail four times within a few minutes, that U.S.
air defenses would fail across the board to intercept the hijacked airliners
and that hijackers lacking in flight skills could conduct the exotic
flight maneuvers that top gun fighter pilots say are beyond their own
skills. Still, there is some possibility, however remote, that Allah could
have blessed the hijackers with unbelievable luck.
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- But when we come to the explanation of the collapse of
the Twin Towers, the official story lacks even a remote possibility of
being true. Architects, engineers and physicists know that powerfully
constructed steel buildings do not suddenly collapse at free-fall or
near-free-fall speed simply because they were impacted by airliners and
experienced short-lived, low intensity and limited fires.
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- Physicists also know that there was not enough gravitational
energy to pulverize massive concrete into fine dust, to cut massive steel
beams into appropriate lengths to be loaded and removed on trucks, and
to eject dust and steel beams hundreds of yards horizontally. Physicists
know that if intense fire were present throughout the towers sufficient
to cause steel to weaken and suddenly collapse, such fires would not have
left unburned and unscorched hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper,
which floated all over lower Manhattan.
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- Physicists have raised unanswered questions about the
official explanation's neglect of the known laws of physics. Recently,
Dr. Crockett Grabbe, a Caltech trained applied physicist at the University
of Iowa, observed: "Applying two basic principles, conservation of
energy and conservation of momentum, the government explanation quickly
unravels. NIST conspicuously ignored these principles in their reports.
NIST also ignored the observed twisting of the top 34 floors of the South
Tower before it toppled down. This twisting clearly violates the conservation
of both linear and angular momentum unless a large external force caused
it. Where the massive amounts of energy came from that were needed to
cause the complete collapse of the intact parts below for each tower,
when their tops were in virtual free fall, is not answered in NIST's numerous
volumes of study."
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- Some of NIST's own scientists are questioning its reports.
Dr. James Quintiere, former chief of the fire science division of the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, recently said that "the
official conclusion that NIST arrived at is questionable" and called
for an independent review of NIST's investigation into the collapses
of the WTC towers.
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- Quintiere has called attention to many problems with
NIST's investigation and reports: the absence of a timeline, failure to
explain the collapse of WTC 7, the spoliation of the evidence of a fire
scene, reliance on questionable computer models, the absence of any evidence
for the existence of temperatures NIST predicts as necessary for failure
of the steel and a Commerce Department legal structure that instead of
trying to find the facts "did the opposite and blocked everything."
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- On Aug. 27, 2007, a prominent member of the National
Academy of Sciences and recipient of the National Medal of Science, Dr.
Lynn Margulis, dismissed the official account of 9-11 as a "fraud"
and called for a new, thorough and impartial investigation.
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- On Sept. 5, 2007, U.S. Navy Top Gun fighter pilot and
veteran airline pilot Ralph Kolstad said that the flight maneuvers attributed
to the 9-11 hijackers are beyond his flight skills. "Something stinks
to high heaven," declared Kolstad.
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- When faced with disturbing events, the Romans asked a
question, "Cui bono?" Who benefits? This question was conspicuously
absent from the official investigation.
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- Who are the beneficiaries of 9-11? The answer is: the
military- security complex, which has accumulated tens of billions of dollars
in profits; U.S. oil companies, which hope to get their hands on Iraqi
and perhaps Iranian oil; the Republican Party, which saved a vulnerable
newly elected president, George W. Bush, viewed by many as illegitimately
elected by one vote of the Supreme Court, by wrapping him in the flag
as "war president"; the Republican Federalist Society, which
used 9-11 to achieve its goal of concentrating power in the executive;
Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, who used the "new
Pearl Harbor" to implement their "Project for a New American
Century" and extend American hegemony over the Middle East; and right-wing
Israeli Zionists, who have successfully used American blood and treasure
to eliminate obstacles to Israeli territorial expansion.
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- In addition to American troops and Iraqi and Afghan civilian
casualties, a casualty of the neoconservative "war on terror"
is the civil liberties that protect Americans from tyranny. President
Bush and his corrupt Department of Justice (sic) have declared our constitutional
protections to be null and void at the whim of the executive.
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- The greatest benefactors of 9-11 are the authoritarian
personalities that John Dean says have taken over the Republican Party.
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- To find out more about Paul Craig Roberts, and read features
by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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- COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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