[Peace-discuss] Fisk puzzles over 9/11
Morton K. Brussel
brussel4 at insightbb.com
Sat Aug 25 16:16:31 CDT 2007
This piece from Robert Fisk may somewhat appease some on this list,
who believe that there are many unanswered and disturbing questions,
still, about 9/11.
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Article
Published on Saturday, August 25, 2007 by The Independent/UK
Spare Me The ‘Ravers’, But Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About
9/11
by Robert Fisk
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.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
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