- The anti-war movement has proven impotent to stop the
war in Iraq despite the fact that the war was initiated on the basis of
lies and deception. The anti-war movement stands helpless to prevent President
Bush from attacking Iran or any other country that he might demonize for
harboring a future 9/11 threat.
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- September 11 enabled Bush to take America to war and
to keep America at war even though the government's explanation of the
events of September 11 is mired in controversy and disbelieved by a large
percentage of the population.
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- Although the news media's investigative arm has withered,
other entities and individuals continue to struggle with unanswered questions.
In the six years since 9/11, numerous distinguished scientists, engineers,
architects, intelligence officers, pilots, military officers, air traffic
controllers, and foreign dignitaries have raised serious and unanswered
questions about the official story line.
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- Recognition of the inadequacy of the official account
of the collapse of the twin towers is widespread in the scientific and
technical community. One of the most glaring failures in the official account
is the lack of an explanation of the near free-fall speed at which the
buildings failed once the process began. Some scientists and engineers
have attempted to bolster the official account with explanations of how
this might happen in the absence of explosives used in controlled demolitions.
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- One recent example is the work of Cambridge University
engineer, Dr. Keith Seffen, published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics
and reported by the BBC on September 11, 2007. Dr. Seffen constructed a
mathematical model that concludes that once initiation of failure had begun,
progressive collapse of the structures would be rapid.
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- Another example is the work of retired government scientist
Dr. Manuel Garcia, commissioned by CounterPunch to fill the gaping void
in the official report. Garcia concludes, as does Seffen, that explosives
are not necessary to explain the near free-fall speed at which the WTC
buildings collapsed.
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- Seffen and Garcia each offer a speculative hypothesis
about what could have happened. Their accounts are not definitive explanations
based on evidence of what did happen. Thus, Seffen and Garcia bring us
to the crux of the matter: To understand the buildings' failures, we must
rely on theoretical speculative models, because the forensic evidence was
not examined. Their explanations thus have no more validity than a speculative
hypothesis that explains the failure of the buildings as a result of explosives.
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- To rationally choose between the hypotheses, we would
need to see how well each fits with the evidence, but most of the evidence
was quickly dispersed and destroyed by federal authorities. Most of the
evidence that remains consists largely of human testimony: the hundred
witnesses who were inside the two towers and who report hearing and experiencing
explosions and the televised statement of Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder
of the WTC properties, who clearly said that the decision was made "to
pull" WTC 7.
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- Today, six years after 9/11, money, ideologies, accumulated
resentments, and political careers are all allied with the official story
line on 9/11. Anyone on a Republican mailing list or a conservative activist
list, such as Young Americans for Freedom, knows that fundraising appeals
seldom fail to evoke the 9/11 attack on America. The 9/11 attacks gave
neoconservatives their "new Pearl Harbor" that enabled them to
implement their hegemonic agenda in the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks gave
Americans boiling with accumulated frustrations a foe upon whom to vent
their rage. Politicians, even Democrats, could show that they stood tall
for America. George W. Bush has invested two presidential terms in "fighting
terror" by invading countries in the Middle East.
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- September 11 doubters are a threat to the legitimacy
of these massive material and emotional interests. That is why they are
shouted down as "conspiracy theorists." But if the government's
story has to be improved by outside experts in order to be plausible, then
it is not irrational or kooky to doubt the official explanation.
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- Elements of the American left-wing are also frustrated
by 9/11 doubters. CounterPunch, for example, views 9/11 as blowback from
an immoral US foreign policy and as retribution for America's past sins
in the Middle East. Manuel Garcia shares this viewpoint. In the September
12, 2007, CounterPunch, Garcia writes that "rationalists and realists"
are people who see 9/11 "as blowback from decades of inhuman US foreign
policy." Viewing 9/11 as a government conspiracy lets US foreign policy
off the hook.
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- This is a legitimate point of view. But it has a downside.
September 11 was the excuse for committing yet more inhuman deeds by initiating
open-ended wars on both Muslims and US civil liberties. Defending the government's
account, instead of pressing the government for accountability, was liberating
for the Bush administration.
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- Even in the official account, the story is one of massive
failures: the failures of US intelligence services, the failures of airport
security, the failures to intercept the hijacked airliners, the failures
to preserve evidence. If a common front had taken the Bush administration
to task both for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks and for an explanation
of 9/11 so inadequate that its plausibility depends on outside experts,
Bush could not have so easily shifted the blame to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Most 9/11 doubters do not insist on the US government's complicity in the
deed. Failure to protect, or incompetence, is a sufficient charge to deter
an administration from war by turning it against itself with demands for
accountability.
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- But no one was held accountable for 9/11 except Muslim
countries. This is the reason the anti-war movement is impotent.
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- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution
: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the
Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author
with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors
and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
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- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18391.htm
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