-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 26, 2007 8:14:55 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Doubting the Official Version of 9/11
Robert Fisk:
Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
The Independent (UK), 25 August 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2893860.ece
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always
someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the "raver".
Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with
bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me
as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle
East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But
the "raver" is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in
Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in
Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the
country, there will always be a "raver".
His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you're
a free journalist, don't you report what you really know about
9/11? Why don't you tell the truth – that the Bush administration
(or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the Twin Towers? Why
don't you reveal the secrets behind 9/11?
The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an
absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing
final proof of what "all the world knows" (that usually is the
phrase) – who destroyed the Twin Towers. Sometimes the "raver" is
clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me,
and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was
a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the "truth"; that while there are
unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent
of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have
quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran,
the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan.
My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush
administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically
diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on
earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes
against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as
the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa'ida is on the run is
not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. "We
disrupted al-Qa'ida, causing them to run," Colonel David Sutherland
said of the preposterously code-named "Operation Lightning Hammer"
in Iraq's Diyala province. "Their fear of facing our forces proves
the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them." And more of
the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa'ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and
slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with
the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush
watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he
this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in
a different country called Cambodia, whose population was
eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush's more
courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But – here we go: I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies
in the official narrative of 9/11.
It's not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft
parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the
officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in
Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93's debris spread over
miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field?
Again, I'm not talking about the crazed "research" of David Icke's
Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which
should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example,
that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the
steel beams of the Twin Towers – whose melting point is supposed to
be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They
collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the
so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers
Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at
5.20 pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground
when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of
Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the
destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on
WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering
– very definitely not in the "raver" bracket – are now legally
challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the
grounds that it could be "fraudulent or deceptive".
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial
reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers –
which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to
dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew
member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so
let's claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as
the CIA's list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men
who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle
East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta,
the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose
"Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA –
mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta
mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would
be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-
murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on
to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let
alone expect the text of the "Fajr" prayer to be included in Atta's
letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers.
Spare me the plots.
But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of
9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic,
meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq
and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East.
Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an
empire now – we create our own reality".
True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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