Source: The Independent
http://news. independent. co.uk/fisk/ article2893860.
ece
Robert Fisk: Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11
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 5.20pm 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.
___________________________________________________________
Want ideas for reducing your carbon footprint? Visit Yahoo! For Good
http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/forgood/environment.html
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
Biofuel@sustainablelists.org
http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages):
http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
