- Arrived back at Key West at 10:33 p.m. last night. I
have driven 4,765 miles in the three weeks.
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- Tomorrow is September 11. I have thought a lot about
the events of that day since switching on the television in Iowa on that
morning last year, and seeing the horrific, fascinating events unfold:
the Pentagon crash-bombed, huge skyscraper towers collapsing like concertinas,
the second one with an almost beautiful symmetry as the air compressed
by each descending floor puffed plumes of debris, dust, and wreckage out
to every side.
-
- Even as I listened to the television that day, and took
down staccato notes of each bulletin released to us by an as yet uncensored
media, I became conscious of a mounting skepticism about the events.
-
- That skepticism has only increased as the weeks and months
passed. Being the webmaster of a site which ranks among the top 50,000
of the world, I have had the advantage of being the focal point of the
unbelievers, infidels in their own way, who have deluged me with their
own viewpoints, or links to articles and investigative news stories in
little-known local newspapers (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is one shining
example). And thereby hangs the point of what I am now writing.
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- Let nobody impugn the courage of the officers and men
who, as the word now has it, ran into the Twin Towers when everybody else
was rushing out: the firemen, and the officers of the New York police department.
A Hundsfott who suggests that that is the purpose of the words that follow!
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-
- AS GREAT as were the professionalism and sacrifice of
those officers, so great is the cowardice of the American journalists of
both print and broadcast media in failing to follow up the leads which
have glared at them from all around.
-
- I have always been a great admirer of American journalism.
Newspaper articles in The Los Angeles Times or the newspapers of the Knight
Ridder Group, for example, far outclass any of the writing that I can find
in their European counterparts.
-
- One of the pleasures of getting off the plane in Miami,
apart from being hit in the face by the hot wet flannel that Florida calls
a climate, is picking up for 35 cents a copy of The Miami Herald: and occasionally
even the Herald has not failed us -- as when it reported, many months ago,
on Oct. 31, that six men driving three sedans had been picked up by police
in the mid-West and found to be carrying maps of Florida nuclear power
plants and other installations, and Israeli passports; but that they were
released soon after, when Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters
confirmed that the papers were genuine; and that the F.B.I was furious
at hearing this, and demanded their rearrest, only to hear they had probably
escaped into Canada. And that the next day JohnAshcroft, the attorney general,
said that the whole story was untrue
-
- The story has not just disappeared from the newspapers,
like those Israelis caught cheering and videotaping the collapsing buildings
from the top of a truck in New Jersey (they were imprisoned for a while,
then quietly deported, and the truck's owners meanwhile did a bunk for,
presumably, Israel, having been working all along for The Mossad).
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- It never happened. Or rather, it has unhappened.
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-
- ALL of these strange events are the stuff of which a
Franz Kafka or George Orwell novel might be made, but they belong in a
loftier realm than the items which have continued to puzzle me all year
long. Of which, more below.
-
- What has disturbed me is the readiness of the journalists
to gobble up every strand of propaganda spaghetti that their fear-crazed
government has fed to them. Are they frightened of being accused of alack
of patriotism?
-
- See how that word has now been abused and exploited by
the government, like all the other derogatory p-words from pedophilia and
pornography to now, well, president. (I predicted to friends at Cincinnati
over a week ago that President George W Bush would soon declare Sept.11
a national day, and call it "Patriot Day," and events have not
proved me wrong.)
-
- The fundamental and perhaps fateful step that Washington
has taken has been to hide from public view, and even deny, the punitive
nature of the attack (with the obvious corollary that it was a one-off
spectacular: and there will be no more).
-
- The character-building British public school education,
with all the beatings that went with it in the 1950s, taught me at least
that an essential part of being an adult was to take punishment like a
man, without yelping.
-
- Tomorrow, Sept. 11, 2002, is going to be one day-long
Washington and media yelp, all over again -- an act of national denial.
-
- The self-evident truth is that the Muslims carried out
this fearsomely intrepid attack on the Twin Towers -- eight men bringing
down all seven buildings of the World Trade Center -- and on the Pentagon
because of the blind United States support of Israel despite the latter's
criminal and repressive policies in the Middle East; or because of the
presence of the American infidels on hallowed Muslim ground in Saudi Arabia,
a presence motivated purely by greed for the region's oil treasures; or
both.
-
- Even Abraham Foxman, the unlovable director of the Anti-Defamation
League, admits that he shuddered at the prospect of the increased anti-Semitic
feelings that the attacks were sure to generate.
-
- He did not shudder for long. It has not happened. Instead
the Americans now surely believe that a weird Middle Eastern mystic called
Osama bin laden, of whom they had not hitherto been told, had plotted to
destroy their cherished freedoms. Never has a lie been so swiftly crafted
and so blatantly and often retold. The propaganda management of the post-Sept.11
epoch has been magnificent, and I hope we are one day allowed to learn
the name of this new American Dr Joseph Goebbels.
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- American journalists are however not the American public.
It is their sacred national duty to investigate what really happened and
why. In this they have -- with a very few honorable exceptions -- failed.
Discretion has got the better of what little valour they might have succumbed
to.
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- Let me make plain here that I do not for a moment subscribe
to the more lunatic theories vapored around the Internet. Carol Valentine
has suggested that there were no humans aboard the planes, and that they
were steered by remote control into the buildings no doubt by Mossad agents.
Other messages sent to me try to persuade me that powerful explosive were
used to pre-detonate the buildings just before each plane hit. Another
ingenious theory has it that there was no plane at all that hit the Pentagon
-- it was a missile.
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- I am not pleased that correspondents have sent me such
items as these. Assuming that they are not agents provocateurs inserted
into the entire 9/11 debate in order to discredit it entirely, it implies
that they think my brain is completely addled, and it is not.
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- During my five thousand mile drive around the country
these last three weeks, my weary braincells have however pondered a number
of evident flaws in these strands of propaganda-spaghetti.
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-
- WE ARE told that the passengers made calls on their
cellphones to their next of kin (indeed, we learn that the hijackers on
United Airlines 93 actually invited passengers to do so, a fact which tests
my credulity to the extreme). Question: Do commercial cellphones work at
that altitude, inside the metal box of airplanes? I don't know, I am merely
ask. I found my Sprint phone went dead several times at ground level driving
across Tennessee. Or were the passengers using the seatback payphones?
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- Perhaps that does not matter. This does: According to
my own Arab experts and to a detailed analysis by the main German television
channel ARD, the F.B.I. or the Pentagon doctored the translation of the
Osama bin Laden television videos before transmission, to insert words
and passages indicating that he had prior knowledge of the attacks and
masterminded them. (I myself have a suspicion that Mohammed Atta, wherever
he is, or the real hijackers' leader, is scratching his head and saying:
"Osama bin Who? Who is this guy?") The US journalists have made
no mention whatever of this outrageous fakery.
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- While we are on Arabic documents, consider the Arabic
letters which the F.B.I. claimed to have found shortly after the attack.
The Washington Post initially described them as consisting of five pages,
allegedly written by Mohammed Atta himself: oops, only four have been released
by the F.B.I. Internal evidence also shows that one page is missing.
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- What was on the fifth? The actual reasons for the Muslims'
grim punitive expedition? Or errors so blatant that the page had to be
scrapped?
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- Just how authentic are the other four pages? Their actual
content makes any Arabic expert wince: under Islamic law, women cannot
be killed, yet the handwritten "manual" makes no attempt to work
around this problem for the hijackers. It even talks of "taking prisoners"
and disposing of "loot" (permitted under Islamic law).
-
- Walking the junior team members through the take-off
procedure, the letter's author says the plane will "hesitate"
before take off, and he uses other language that may seem strange for the
trained pilot that Atta had become. The letter also tells the men to make
sure their "suits" are in order before boarding the plane. The
Arabic word is definitely formal, "suits", but airport closed
circuit TV shows the hijackers wearing open neck shirts and slacks as they
pass through the boarding gates. The list is too full to go into here,
but Eric Mueller went over all the ingredients at his lecture at Cincinnati
last week.
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- Mohammed Atta himself, the alleged ringleader, is an
enigma: his father insists his son would never have become involved; his
tutor and professor at the university in Hamburg where he studied for many
years were shocked, stating that such an act was totally out of character.
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- We have been shown no handwriting reports by experts
comparing the letters found with known samples of his handwriting -- letters
to girlfriends and the like. The Hamburg university and police authorities
must have obtained many samples of Atta's handwriting in both Arabic and
western handwriting. We are told that the C.I.A. had him under surveillance
there for a year before he transferred to the USA. Perhaps one conclusion
is that the letter or letters were not written by Atta at all, but subsequently
foisted onto the F.B.I.
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- One thing is certain: given the precision with which
the four-plane operation was planned, each four-man team would have been
identically equipped and would have been following identical plans of operation.
Failure was not an option.
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- We know from an air-to-ground call by one flight attendant
that one hijacker aboard one plane had "shot" the Israeli passenger
seated directly in front of him (she gave the seat numbers). So there was
a gun. If one team had a gun, it follows that each team had a gun.
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- In fact that is obvious: no four-man team equipped just
with the proverbial boxcutters could have guaranteed to seize control a
jumbo-jet laden with up to 450 passengers and crew (the planners had to
assume as a worst-case scenario a full load on each plane) unless each
team had at least one firearm.
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- There is no other way that such a small team could have
simultaneously neutralized both the passenger cabins and the flight crew
on the flight deck. Remember: They could not countenance failure.
-
- So why is the public fed the boxcutter story? The answer
may be purely commercial: If the two airlines involved had negligently
let guns get onto all four planes, they would be liable in law for damage
claims, including the direct loss of the seven buildings, that would bring
down the entire U.S. airline industry. (The swiftness with which the government
later moved to set a cap on any such claims supports this theory).
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- We have heard rumours that one member of the team that
seized United Airlines flight 93 over Pennsylvania was wearing a bogus
American Airlines uniform, and was allowed a seat in the flight deck as
a courtesy. The same damages considerations would apply if this is true.
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-
- CAPTIVATING theories circulate about the role of The
Mossad before and after the catastrophe. Despite the overwhelmingly financial
character of the World Trade Center, it is startling but true that only
one Israeli was killed in their collapse (originally the figure was thought
to be as much as three); there may be a statistical explanation -- e.g.
that they held dual citizenship, and are listed under their alternative
citizenship. But the cowardly U.S. media have drawn a discreet veil over
this anomaly as well.
-
- A tip-off seems an unlikely explanation: Like all conspiracy
theories, it trips up at the consideration that too many people would have
had to be in the know.
-
- There are however major isolated anomalies that still
seek an explanation, e.g. that the half Israeli-government owned shipping
firm Zim quit its premises high up in one of the Twin Towers, expensively
breaking its lease, just a week before the disaster and refuses to explain
why.
-
- Another Israeli tenant-firm in the building admitted
openly in the media the next day that it had received warning emails from
Israel an hour or two before the attack; it passed them on to The Mossad,
their own Intelligence service, before the attack, but did not inform the
FBI until afterwards. So much for patriotism.
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-
- I AM not going to pause for even a moment on American
Airlines Flight 587, which mysteriously came down in a New York suburb
a few days after Sept. 11. Fearful that another terrorist success would
ruin the airline industry, the government swiftly moved to crush all speculation.
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- Eye-witnesses, fifty of them including police officers,
who saw a "car-sized" explosion on the fuselage were discounted.
As the tail-plane (left) had become detached and landed in the bay some
distance away, a female National Transportation Safety Board spokesman
at 10:53 p.m. that same evening ended the debate by saying that it is the
cockpit voice recorder they have recovered. "Everything tells us that
we are proceeding appropriately -- considering it to be an accident."
-
- I wrote down those convoluted and improbable words as
she spoke them. The F.A.A.'s own subsequent action disproved that version:
Any catastrophic structural failure of an airplane, in this case an Airbus,
would have led to a grounding of the entire worldwide fleet of that airplane
type until the defect had been diagnosed and remedied. No such recall was
issued, so the F.A.A. did not believe its own version.
-
- Far more bothersome is the crash of (Todd Beamer: "Let's
roll!") United Airlines 93. The evidence is sad: It suggests that
Beamer's little crew probably succeeded in recapturing the airliner from
the hijackers, only to be shot out of the sky by a US fighter plane acting
on presidential orders.
-
- The government's version is, ahem, different: No missile
fired, but the plane diving vertically into the ground at Shanksville,
intact, with the heroes still battling the hijackers in the cockpit, determined
to save the White House and Bush's staff if not his exalted skin. (The
evidence now provided by al-Jazeera, if it can be believed, is that this
plane's target for punishment was the U.S. Capitol, as I suspected all
along: the White House would be a difficult, if not impossible target to
identify and destroy with certainty.)
-
- The evidence for a shoot-down is formidable: One engine
was found 2,000 yards away from the crash site; letters over ten miles
away, some of them charred with burn holes; eye witnesses saw a fighter
plane or planes at the same time; a seismic station nearby recorded a supersonic
boom at a time when the government has not admitted, or has actively denied,
that warplanes were in the area.
-
- Evidence for a cover up is no less concrete: A passenger
made, we are told, the last call from the toilet of United Airlines 93,
to a dispatcher on the ground. The caller said first that the plane had
been hijacked, repeated that it had been hijacked -- this was not a hoax;
and then, that there had been an explosion on the plane and it was full
of white smoke. That is what the news media announced an hour later --
I typed it down as they said it.
-
- There is an eight minute gap in the records so far released
between that call and the plane hitting the ground at 10:06 a.m., twenty
minutes before the North Tower collapsed in New York bringing the attacks
to a spectacular finale.
-
- Whether a US fighter plane had first made a pass, as
normal shoot-down procedure would require, to establish contact with the
flight deck and order it to land immediately, we don't know: Because that
part of the tape has been withheld or destroyed.
-
- The F.B.I. has also confiscated the tape of the conversation
with the dispatcher, and forbidden her to talk. Could it be because of
the caller's remark about an explosion? Had the hijackers carried a bomb
on board? Hardly, although that is what Washington at once hinted. None
of the other teams carried bombs, and since the objective was to use the
planes as manned missiles, to have carried a bomb aboard would have been
ridiculous.
-
- The evidence against United 93 having been shot down
is more spare, though not entirely inconsiderable. The president has not
admitted it. The air force has denied it. Many more people than the pilot
would shortly afterward have learned of his deed: Ground crew would have
loaded live ammunition into the plane, and would have detected that it
had been used when it landed.
-
- But just as the captain of the USS Liberty was rewarded
for his silence after his ship was attacked on the high seas with heavy
loss of life by the Israelis, and threatened with fierce punishment if
he talked, so too these officers and men can have been shown both the carrot
and the stick. Told of the Shanksville crash, Bush himself asked Vice President
Dick Cheney whether it was a result of the order just given. Cheney's answer
was evasive at best.
-
- It remains a mystery to me why Bush did not admit to
the action at once, and gain the entire world's sympathy, just as Winston
Churchill admitted to attacking the French fleet in July 1940, and derived
much strategic capital from the episode. Instead, just like his father,
Bush has in my view tangled himself and his closest henchmen in a web of
deceit.
-
- His cronies later readily admitted to telling other lies
-- the little white lie that they also had evidence that Air Force One,
the presidential airplane, was a terrorist target, hence its erratic all-day
scamper across country to anywhere but Washington.
-
- The Big Shanksville Lie, if lie it is, is more serious.
Son of a famous president who once memorably sneered "read my lips"
as a promise not to increase taxation, George W Bush has evidently decided
he cannot afford to be caught lying.
-
- The Big Lie remains just that. The techniques are just
more subtle. The tapes of the last call from United 93 and of the airliner's
cockpit voice recorder are not all that have vanished from public view.
No mention of the Twin Towers catastrophe has made in any television sitcom
for the last fifty-two weeks. Unless I am mistaken, the towers have themselves
vanished from the background of many a sitcom's title-sequence, e.g. Friends,
airbrushed out as wantonly as a birthmark from a Penthouse model's belly.
-
- Seeing them back in the New York skyline would just anger
the Americans, or remind them of this disastrous punishment administered
by a grim handful of hellbent men.
-
- There is much other than the propaganda techniques being
used that reminds us historians of WW2: The obfuscations, for example,
and the comfortable knowledge that the public memory is short.
-
- Even the appointment of Karzai as a puppet prime minister
of the new pro-American Afghanistan smacks of WW2 and the satraps appointed
by Adolf Hitler to rule his expanding empire. Karzai's own peoples have
seen through him, as the several assassination attempts already testify.
In any other scenario he would be called a Quisling. But not by the brave
American press.
-
- These are all superficial wonders. The deeper mysteries
prevail: Why is George Bush going after the Taliban, since evidence --
real evidence -- linking them with the Sept. 11 attacks is non-existent?
And why is that other Quisling, our own prime minister Tony Blair, so frivolously
leading my own country to perdition, frolicking along on the U.S. president's
shirttails?
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- There is a possible answer, though an ugly one. I have
long suspected, and history may bear me out on this, that both the Labour
Party and the Conservative Party in Britain have been simultaneously receiving
secret funding from America's Central Intelligence Agency through some
suitable front organisation, perhaps an educational trust.
-
- In the real world of politics this is, alas, the way
that what Sir Oswald Mosley called "the Old Gang" have always
done things. (Mosley himself of course solicited money from both Hitlerand
Benito Mussolini).
-
- The Conservatives never explained how they suddenly liquidated
their £19m bank overdraft a few years back, while still in power;
and the Labour party also seems to have solved its financial troubles in
a jiffy.
-
- Buy the blind support of an entire country for one tenth
the price of a Boeing 767? Cheap at the price. We have seen how venal the
British are.
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- http://www.fpp.co.uk/docs/Irving/RadDi/2002/100902.html
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